Best response to Crutcher's 3/11/2013 blog
"I understand you have some credentials in mathematics, but I do not see any science credentials. That is unfortunate because you need them to understand the technology discovered by Dr. Phillip Thorpe and Peregrine.
Your understanding of p values and statistical significance is also rudimentary at best. I am not going to try to teach you, as it is clear you and your and others like Adam F ( another so called biotech journalist with NO biotech/science credentials) have an agenda to misinform the investing community of the powerful science Peregrine has discovered.
I will a least educate you, in order for your followers not to laugh at future articles, such as this latest one on PPHM, that phase II trials are NOT designed for statistical significance.
PPHM's phase IIb double blinded placebo controlled trial in NSCLC, developed by Dr. Robert Garnick the father of Genentech with 17 drug approvals, was NOT a failure. In fact it did achieve statistical significance before the trial was sabotaged, and even Garnick stated "I have NEVER witnessed a phase II trail that achieved this".
Because it was sabotaged "clear evidence of dose switching" PPHM gave the control group a few patients with the study agent (1mg/kg bavi). This obviously changed the MOS in the control group to increase it from 5.6 months (historical MOS in all trials to date in 2nd line using ONLY doc is about 6 months) to 7.3 months.
This REDUCED the % increase from the bavi 3mg/kg MOS from over 100% to 60%, and with the final censored patients (yes censored patients...you should have done your homework before you write articles) reduced the MOS in the 3mg bavi arm to 11.7 months (the highest EVER reported!)
So you see bavi beat the SOC by 60% with one arm (pun intended) tied behind its back!"
