The crowd at the presentations "ooohed" whn that hit the screen. I'm surprised the lay press didn't sieze on the big increase in cancer deaths -- bigger than the infection deaths -- on the torcetrapib arm.
The presenter said a post-hoc interview of docs showed no difference in neoplasms detected between the arms, "ruling out a relationship with cancer."
This is interesting trial data to look at. It's a walking, squawking example of the law of large numbers. For instance, there was a different of 0.1 in the BMI between arms and the difference shot a p=0.014. Nearly statistically significant simply due to the large numbers. There's a lot of that in these data nad I think as people grasp for straws as to what went wrong, we'll see some sketchy statistical "proof" from this trial out there.
Unless otherwise indicated, this is the personal viewpoint of David Miller and not necessarily that of Biotech Stock Research, LLC
