Biotech Values

[NP1986]

you are making assumptions that the trial design is weak,

It's not an assumption; I'm just stating what should be patently obvious: the trial was not explicitly designed to measure overall survival.

the baselines are different from each other,

I never claimed that they are different, but I would definitely want to see that information before being confident that the OS signal is "real".

you're assuming PPHM is intentionally misleading the public and accusing them of being fraudulent.

I don't claim to know what PPHM's intentions are and haven't accused them of lying per se. Nonetheless, I have seen some misleading PRs from them in the past, and I wouldn't put it past them to be over-exuberant in their reporting of the results of the 2nd line NSCLC trial. While I am probably more skeptical of PPHM than I would be of other companies, I would afford the same level of scrutiny to these "results" even if they came from another company.

why don't you all just shut up and admit we'll all see soon enough?

One of the points I've been trying to get across is that we probably won't get a definitive answer on whether bavituximab improves OS for 2nd line NSCLC, even once the full results of this trial become available. For that, we would have to have results from a phase III trial with OS as the primary endpoint - and we're not likely to have those results any time soon.

Of course, the share price could get a nice pop when PPHM announce the full results, but that's a separate issue from what I've raised above.

if they get a partnership deal in the fairly near term after what will surely be exhaustive due diligence on the research details, what will be your basis for assuming any validity then?

A partnership deal would be positive, but it does not change the scientific validity of the results. There are certain unknowns that a potential partner will not be able to answer even after completely dissecting the data from the trial. If these unknowns did not exist, there would be no reason to conduct a phase III study - which I maintain will be necessary.