As part of the global strategic alliance between Merck and Pfizer to jointly develop and commercialize avelumab*, an investigational immune checkpoint inhibitor, the companies have announced that they have a collaboration agreement in place with Dako, an Agilent Technologies company, for the development of a potential companion diagnostic test . The three-party agreement, signed recently, enables Dako, Merck and Pfizer to work to develop the CDx to assess programmed death-ligand 1 protein expression levels in tumor tissue, and its microenvironment, including tumor-associated immune cells.