Biotech Values

[iwfal]

There was talk on YMB last fall about the interims being based on O'Brien Fleming around a .001 threshold, and I don't know what that translates to. Clearly there are a range of interim practices and no single convention on what "O'Brien Fleming" means.

This is almost certainly "board noise" - pretty common on YMB. And not even clear whether it was intended to be single or double sided. Try searching up the board for the ultimate source and its reliability. Note also that O'Brien Fleming is absolutely unambiguous.

I actually think the control arm is performing well. I think more common use of concurrent chemo-radio is producing good results. I wouldn't be surprised if the control MST came out in the 23 to 25 month range.

I'm on record with a wager that the Control Arm MST is >=24 months. FWIW.

the MST in the Phase IIB for Stimuvax was one patient short of being around 47 months. The 47-month survival was 49%. Again, I'm not saying this is an enormous trump card, but it's important data. I think we'd be having a very different discussion, at very different price levels, if that statistic had been 51% instead of 49%.

What matters is HR (and the associated p value) - relative medians are just a convenient proxy for them. And the ratio of 30 to 13 is much more aligned with the HR of about 0.55. So I would suggest that the exact time of event of that one patient matters almost not at all