Pharma Q1 Results Preview: Merck & Co, Pfizer, Gilead, Novo Nordisk, Teva, Celgene

Merger appetites and competitive dynamics will continue to be assessed as investors grill the next round of biopharma companies presenting first quarter sales and earnings. Gilead and Pfizer will be particularly pressed on deals.

Hand man doing finances and calculate on desk about cost at home office.

The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) meeting in April was a big event for Merck & Co. Inc., as the company's combination of Keytruda (pembrolizumab) with chemotherapy outshone rival combinations from Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and Roche in first-line, metastatic non-small cell lung cancer.

Merck's combination received accelerated approval from the US FDA in May 2017, and Keytruda has also been approved as a monotherapy in first-line NSCLC with at least 50% PD-L1 expression since October 2016. (Also see "It’s Here: Merck’s Keytruda Cleared For First-Line Lung Cancer" - Scrip, 25 October, 2016.) The company recently announced that Keytruda monotherapy was shown to work at all levels of expression in the KEYNOTE-042 study, which promises to solidify its grip on the indication

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