Avid Bioservices Inc (CDMO)

[entdoc]

my take-away from the cc: dawning realization in the executive suite that the Bavi PIII was a pipe dream from the beginning in terms of a home-run for Bavi as a giant (advanced lung cancer) killer, either alone or in chemo-combo. King's responses to most of the questions seemed muddled. A clear-cut strategy with Bavi remains to be defined. The immunohistological stains of [evented] trial patient tumors will be important to potential immunological treatment partners; and thank God for Avid. The most important question is why the Doce-chemo arm patients performed so much better than historical norms, and how these control patients compare to the Bavi-treated Doce group.
I don't think this study is the death-knell for Bavi or PPHM. We have all learned something from it, and I only wish I were on the inside picking up the pieces, because the post-mortem on the study (and the patients) will be immensely interesting.
This reminds me of the cochlear implant project in which the original implant inventor was almost certain of a home-run..that deaf implant recipients would be hearing in stereo with his home-made bipolar silastic and gold wire implant. However, the initial trials were a squeaker, with only equivocal improvement in hearing with the first implants. the debate was intense whether to go on. Implanted patients were farmed out to various institutions for testing. It was concluded that perhaps the implant was marginally helpful. The deaf could hear sound, but was it significantly meaningful? Since those days in the early 1970s when a crudely manufactured and implanted wire was electrically charged and the patients heard a tone, to the present time, the cochlear implant has become standard of care for deaf one-year-olds who are mainstreamed with normal-hearing peers in public school. I see that future for anti-PS, and for anti-phospholipid therapy, and suspect that Bavi is actually a crude prototype for "biosimilars" to follow. PPHM needs to continue its preeminence in this field.