Four abstracts presented at this year's American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) conference in May have strengthened the body of research into Bristol-Myers Squibb's Opdivo (nivolumab), hailing it as the new standard of care in recurrent metastatic renal cell carcinoma (mRCC), according to analysts with research and consulting firm GlobalData.

As explored in GlobalData's most recent renal cell carcinoma (RCC) report, Opdivo is set to help the RCC market hit $3.6 billion by 2023, and these recent data further explore the relationship between disease progression and the benefits of Opdivo treatment.

Dr Maxime Bourgognon, GlobalData's Analyst covering Oncology and Hematology, states that trials producing such data have done much to demonstrate Opdivo's positive qualities, such as promising survival outcome rates, objective response rates, and toxicity.

Dr Bourgognon explains: "Trials of Opdivo have measured the drug against Afinitor, a competitor in the mRCC space. For example, several studies have verified the association between response rate and survival in mRCC patients treated with Opdivo (Escudier et al. 2016; Motzer et al., 2016).

"Abstracts from the Motzer et al. analysis revealed that patients are more likely to demonstrate tumor response with Opdivo compared to Afinitor, and tumor response is correlated with patient survival, meaning tumor response is clinically significant. In another study, McDermott et al. have reported promising long-term overall survival of patients treated with Opdivo during the course of the Phase I and II trials, which both preceded the pivotal Phase III Checkmate-025 trial (McDermott et al., 2016)."

Dr Dan Roberts, GlobalData's Senior Analyst covering Oncology and Hematology, adds: "These long-term results support the initial data published in the New England Journal of Medicine in September 2015, and further demonstrate that Opdivo significantly improves survival with a good quality-of-life."