Anavex Life Sciences Corp (AVXL)

[TomP1]

Below again the hit article on The Street that was the trigger for the shareprice drop from 14 to 3,... They are just not a credible source and always have a hidden agenda. Keep that in mind.




The effort to promote Anavex Life Sciences (AVXL) with claims of a cure for Alzheimer's disease began this summer and intensified more recently as the company underwent a reverse stock split and moved from trading on the bulletin boards to the Nasdaq.

On Saturday, Anavex presented interim results from a small clinical trial of its drug Anavex 2-73 at an Alzheimer's research meeting in Barcelona. The Anavex data presentation didn't even come close to proving Anavex 2-73 cures Alzheimer's, as some outside stock promoters had been claiming.

Nor is the drug even a breakthrough treatment for Alzheimer's, as Anavex claims. On Monday, the company issued a press release announcing the Anavex 2-73 data show encouraging efficacy -- a signal the drug could be attenuating the destructive course of Alzheimer's.

No, the data do not show that at all. Here's why:

In the clinical trial, Anavex took a handful of Alzheimer's patients and treated all of them with a drug they were told might help improve their memory and cognition. After taking Anavex 2-73 for just five weeks, the patients were given a battery of tests to measure memory and cognition. Not surprisingly, the memory and cognition of the patients improved just a little bit.

To Anavex and its stock promoters, this was success. To everyone else, it's just another classic example of a placebo effect. The handful of Alzheimer's patients in the Anavex study improved over a short period of time because they were easily convinced the drug they were taking would help them.

"The chance you would have gotten similar data giving the patients 10 cups of coffee a day instead? Almost 100%," said Dr. Adam Kline, an Alzheimer's disease researcher who reviewed the Anavex 2-73 data presented Saturday.

The only way to produce credible data in Alzheimer's is to conduct randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies. One group of patients is randomized to receive a drug, the other group of patients received a placebo.

Neither the patients nor their doctors know which arm of the study they're in. These studies need to run 52 weeks, not five weeks, because it takes that long to detect meaningful changes in memory, cognition and functions of daily living of patients.

The small, short, single-arm, open-label study run by Anavex met none of these scientific criteria, making the results presented Saturday clinically meaningless.