An accidental data release by Roche boosts some hopes for anti-TIGIT cancer immunotherapies

The multibillion-dollar hunt for what many drugmakers hope will be the next big immunotherapy target has had no shortage of twists and tea-leaf-reading. In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, it got another.

Roche confirmed it accidentally released interim data from a closely watched clinical trial testing whether blocking that target — a protein on T cells known as TIGIT — can enable non-small lung cancer patients to live longer than standard immunotherapy alone.

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The announcement release came hours after Evercore analyst Umer Raffat emailed investors that he had found a presentation on a Roche media portal, presumably uploaded by accident.

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