A $25 billion biotech's stock is popping on its promising cancer data

Incyte, a $25 billion biotech company, debuted some new data about its cancer drugs on Wednesday, and the stock popped.

The drugmaker, which has one approved product to treat bone marrow disorders, is developing a kind of cancer immunotherapy called an IDO inhibitor. The goal with these treatments is to harness the body's immune system to attack cancer. When these IDO inhibitor drugs are combined with another checkpoint called PD-1 inhibitors (of which there are already a number that have been approved), the hope is that the two drugs used together could help more people respond to cancer treatments than if they used the PD-1 inhibitors alone.

Incyte's data that came out Wednesday made it seem like that might be the case, at least in some forms of cancer. "Solid data validates IDO as a leading IO add-on," Goldman Sachs said in a note after the data, which is part of the upcoming American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in June.

But even though the results looked good, there were still some reservations regarding how huge the experimental drug could be.

"INCY's IDO looks most promising in this class so far, but not very disruptive as far as the overall [immuno-oncology] space is concerned," Jefferies analyst Jeffrey Holford said in a note.

Incyte was up as much as 8% on Thursday morning.

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