Anavex Life Sciences Corp (AVXL)

[frrol]

Anavex has a challenge. The company has said the "pooled data doesn't reflect the full effects of 2-73". That's a nice way of saying the Part B's overall population isn't showing efficacy, but certain sub-populations are. This is why they showed the sub pop charts - for 2-73 Alone and MCI - in the 26-week poster. One more thing: those two sub-pops are likely correlated. Most of the MCI participants likely also aren't on donepezil. The challenge is: which is the effective independent variable, the participant's early cognitive-loss stage or absence of donepezil? Or both? To tease that out confidently, you need a bigger sample and more robust statistical analytics. The latter I believe is the main reason (not the only one) for hiring Ariana. The former will be assessed by the larger Phase 2/3, which you can bet will have lots of participants for those two specific sub-pops. The Ariana analytics will hopefully reveal the two variables' respective effects. I wouldn't be surprised if both variables are relevant factors and thus have high independent correlation co-efficients in the statistical regression.

Ariana will probably also be used for detecting any less obvious factors that they may have missed for being too obscure.