Dendreon Corp fka DNDNQ

[ocyanblue]

<Also, describing data as above and below median, as it did, is done more with a meat cleaver than with scientific precision. The 40% survival at 36 months for those with above median CD54 upregulation is obviously balanced by a lower figure below median to yield the overall 34% 36 month survival rate.It would seem that a plot of all CD54 upregulation data vs. survival corrected in some maner for Cox covariates found to be statistically significant for survival would be a more precise and useful tool for both DNDN and prescribing docs.>

Rancherho, if only it's that simple. But this analysis is not possible because the placebo patients were not treated so it would be unlikely that there were any CD54 data from them to compare. The division of the treated population by the median for comparison was a reasonable step. One thing that that did point out was that the cross-over treatment was much less effective than the real treatment. This lessens the worry about cross-overs confounding the analysis.

Separately and FYE, the below recently published paper gave some evidence that macrophages recruited to a tumor site may end up assisting metastasis. This argues to some degree for the ex-vivo DC priming approach of Provenge.

http://www.jleukbio.org/cgi/rapidpdf/jlb.1105656v1