Biotech Values

[iwfal]

XOMA cc - my comments. None earth shaking, all tea leaf reading. Nonetheless, for the record. The piece of information I found most interesting (but not encouraging) was that they talked of qualifying the patients as 'erosive' based upon MRIs that show 'erosion'. ClinicalTrials says X-Ray. The problem with that is that there is reasonable data to indicate that MRI is too sensitive - almost all HOA shows up as erosive if MRI is the tool you are using. So they will get a population that is not sick enough - and HOA has a notoriously high 'placebo response' (it is an intermittent disease) so you probably want sicker patients to mitigate that problem.

Note #2 - in response to a question the CMO said that to date the SAE have been the same as placebo. But the question is whether "the same" means statistically the same or numerically (proportionately) the same.