BR-Some have posted that Aria has dropped in the past at the time of ASH presentations of clinical trials of Ariad's drugs. Maybe so, although I thought last year there was a short term pop, because of the intense interest in Iclusig and the sheer number of presentations, some very favorable, on Iclusig trials. In my view, part of the drop today is attributable to the somewhat mediocre results of PACE update in relation to serious AEs: "22% of CP patients experienced an arterial thrombotic serious adverse event (SAE), and 27 percent of CP-CML patients experienced any arterial thrombotic event, independent of severity or attribution of relationship to ponatinib." (As a Citi analyst put it, there was no clear evidence seen in reduction of ATEs.) This overshadowed the remarkably impressive data showing very strong anti-leukemic activity in the very sick patients being given Iclusig. Maybe others will differ, but I believe this removed the likelihood, however remote it might have been, that Iclusig would be even 2nd line therapy, certainly in the near term. As various analysts have noted today, there will be no change to the black box label. And the market responded predictably to this news.
