Biotech Values

[iwfal]

no drug with a OS benefit in PCa has a pain benefit on its label

Agree - but doesn't mean it doesn't exist. In the below cited paper docetaxel showed 35% reduction in pain using a threshold of 2 points on a scale from 0 to 5 (compared to control arm of 22% - my memory was good). I think it is quite likely that if they had used an end point of 1 point reduction that they would have gotten in the range of 50-60% for docetaxel. Higher still if the protocol hadn't required only stable-pain-at-baseline patients to be evaluated at the pain endpoint.

If you know that they measured the pain endpoint this rigorously for XL184 then I'll agree that the pain endpoint looks pretty good. But the impression given by the poster is that, for instance, they didn't use a threshold. In which case the data looks questionable.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa040720#t=articleResults