Clovis Oncology ($CLVS) is one of the winners at the JPM Morgan Healthcare conference (#JPM14) in San Francisco with a dramatic increase in share price over the past several days.

The presentation by Clovis CEO Patrick Mahaffy laid out an aggressive growth plan for drugs in development such as CO-1686 and was clearly well received by analysts and investors alike.

CO-1686 is a third-generation EGFR inhibitor with early data showing that is effective in many non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients who have developed acquired resistance to existing EGFR TKIs.

There are currently no approved treatments for patients who develop a T790 mutation. This unmet medical need offers a sizeable market opportunity as the commercial landscape currently stands.

Clovis, however, are in a race to market with AstraZeneca, who also have an exciting new drug in development, AZD9291.  Preliminary data has shown the agent to also be effective in NSCLC patients with the T790M mutation.

Both companies presented data at the World Lung Conference in Sydney at the end of October last year for their phase 1 trials.

As to which company will get to market first and which product is the best, the race to market is now too close to call and we don’t yet have enough data to compare the merits of the compounds but the JP Morgan Healthcare conference did offer insights.

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