Your guide to a big earnings day

Tuesday was chock-full of biotech earnings, from which some answers to burning questions emerged (at least for one quarter).

• Biktarvy, the most important HIV drug in Gilead Sciences' HIV quiver, delivered $1.1 billion in second-quarter sales, easily topping Wall Street expectations. Can Biktarvy keep Gilead’s dominant HIV position intact? Yes, it surely can. Also: Yescarta sales totaled $120 million — an indication that cancer cell therapy is taking hold.
• Over at Amgen, earnings were on the tepid side but notably, sales of the new-ish migraine drug Aimovig were $83 million and ahead of Street consensus. Aimovig is one of Amgen’s growth products, so this is good news. The bad: Neulasta sales in the quarter disappointed, hit harder by biosimilar competition. On the R&D front, Amgen disclosed tumor “responses” in colon cancer patients treated with its closely followed KRAS inhibitor AMG 510. That’s a significant and positive update from the drug’s debut at ASCO back in June.
• Celgene: The Bristol-Myers Squibb merger is on track to close at the end of the year or early in 2020 concurrent with the divestment of the psoriatic arthritis drug Otezla. But Celgene hinted that a highly anticipated readout from a Phase 3 clinical trial of multiple myeloma CAR-T bb2121 (partnered with Bluebird Bio) might not be ready in time for the American Society of Hematology annual meeting in December.