Biotech Values

[poorgradstudent]

For the record, Allen's explanation that BMY dropped the drug because it was singularly focused on objective response rates really didn't go over with me. Basically, he was saying that BMY didn't bother to look at the survival data at all once they saw the response rates were unchanged. I find this type of talk to be common for drugs that have been cast off from big pharma and rescued by smaller biotechs.

Also, I'm not touting response rate as a 100% reliable predictor of clinical benefit. It is an arbitrary measure. However, for a drug that is hypothetically able to increase the time that a cytotoxic sticks around the cell, it is reasonable to expect an increase in RR. My preference would be to focus on the PFS data as a reliable predictor of survival. Anyways...

On another topic: Yes, you're quite right. AMEV was fiddling with the variable portion of antibodies in order to screen for better binding clones.