Biotech Values

[mcbio]

Pfizer thought that the agent could also work in treating head and neck cancers and lung cancer when it originally invested in the development, but then realized it was limited to GBM, said Dr James Vredenburgh, medical director of Adult Clinical Services at Duke University Medical Center. This is the only reason it was dropped, he said.

Pfizer abandoned rindopepimut because it did not have a worthwhile response, said Dr Joseph Landolfi, a neuro-oncologist at the New Jersey Neuroscience Institute at JFK Medical Center. Immunocellular's (OTC:IMUC) ICT-107 had good Phase I results, he said, noting that the PFS (progression free survival) benefit seen with rindopepimut was not as good in comparison. It is possible that Pfizer saw the vast difference between the two and felt it did not want to "roll the dice," he said.

Patients treated with ICT-107 demonstrated two-year survival rates of 80% with a median PFS rate of 17.7 months. Even with Temodar and radiation, the Celldex vaccine does not compete, he said.

LOL And how does Dr. Landolfi know that PFE dropped rindopepimut because it didn't have a worthwhile response? Seems like Dr. Vredenburgh disagrees with that notion. And the assertion that the CLDX vaccine "does not compete" is silly because, as noted later in the article, it's not even a comparable patient population. It sounds like the patient population targeted by the CLDX GBM vaccine (EGFRvIII) is much harder to treat than the patient population targeted by the IMUC GBM vaccine so it would make sense that the IMUC numbers might look better on the surface.