Biotech Values

[poorgradstudent]

ARRY:

But, could be a nice bonus if the biomarker does pan out as I'd like to see combo data for 520+kyprolis in low AAG patients.

What I'm saying is that this serum protein is probably just a reflection of patient health within the treatment cohort. So even though these people have failed X number of therapies, they're not in identical health nor is it a homogenous disease, and the baseline AAG measurement likely reflects that.

The main reason I say this is because of the lack of disease specific data to explain AAG levels. Unlike T315I in CML or JAK V617F, it's probably a general marker of health that goes up or down in various malignancies. I'd bet that AAG is closer to CRP in the world of biomarkers.

If I was ARRY I wouldn't exclude based on AAG. From the literature it doesn't appear that you can make a reliable, prospective stratification because many papers are just retroactively binning the serum levels into quartiles and quintiles. Dunno if you want to try and sort through all that and risk your clinical development plan on it.