Anavex Life Sciences Corp (AVXL)

[Joseph_K]

Sorry to say, but I don't regard this as a "hit piece." She may be unqualified to give financial advice, but she has a doctorate in cell physiology from Oxford University. She's not a clinical trial expert, but she's pretty qualified to write what she has.

Furthermore, her February 3, 2022, article in SA about the "changed endpoints" controversy over the Avatar trial was one of the two things that convinced me that Anavex was shooting straight on that one. She was invested in Anavex at that point, and also when she wrote a post skeptical of the P2b/3 TLR on December 3, which I found honest in its criticisms -- which gave me greater confidence in her "pro-Anavex" article about Avatar. I think she does what I try to do: call it as I see it uninfluenced by an agenda.

Somehow I doubt that after reading her Avatar piece, which defended Anavex, you would have written, "The article is clearly just pumper nonsense to me!!"


I agree with almost all her concerns, and I don't find them fatal. I do disagree strongly with one of her paragraphs:

One probably needs to have an advanced degree in medical statistics to understand how the new post hoc analysis transforms the ADAS-Cog13 and CDR-SB data from trial failure to trial success (i.e. to be under the critical p <0.025 limit, according to this new criteria of success disclosed/defined in the September 14 PR).

It's wrong to call the p-values from December "failures" because they were above 0.025; they were below 0.05 and thus successes. (I'm going to address the critical sentences* from the PR in a separate post.)


* "The trial is successful in meeting the co-primary endpoints if the significance of each endpoint is P < 0.05, or if the significance of only one co-primary endpoint is P < 0.025. If only one primary endpoint is significant at an a level of 0.025, then the secondary endpoint will be evaluated at the same level of 0.025."