HEAR ME OUT.
MD Anderson picked the cases in the SITC abstract. Right? I'm going to suggest they purposely picked PET scan dates, that would not reveal the RECIST criteria; but yet, needed to support the abstract claim. Why would they do this you might you ask? Imagine, if they were to show patients along points that met RECIST standards? If they did, I think that they would have automatically appeared in guilty for the way they handled the Feurerstein-Buzard PR situation. If they revealed such RECIST data, they would indirectly be supporting NWBO's Direct Ph I reveal over the summer, by showing the data was, in fact, accurate. They wanted that bad press to go away and the tarnish to thier prestigious reputation to be forgotten. And as an effort to not bring it up again, they cherry-picked the result as not to reveal too much efficacy information. As I condend that if they were to reveal any aspect of RECIST, it would reopend the argument of when to reveal open study data; and at all cost, they were desperate to avoid a new PR nightmare over the SITC conference (think Pearlstein's article). Afterall, they could potentially look very badly for keeping such efficacy data away from the world. and the reveal of such RECIST data at SITC could create another PR nightmare for them. Instead, what did they do, they avoided RECIST althogether, no mention of it, other than to state "the analysis of longer-term imaging dat to assess tumor response is in progress." Smart MD Anderson management move in my opinion to avoid a repeat PR mess.
Oh, and there are post circulating on another message Board that Les has confirmed that we will be an end of March update. And so now, here we are at the near the end of the study, and NW is about to have 3 reveals, 1 per month. So ask yourself, why three updates? My anser is to predict that the data is very very very good.
