Why Adam F*&#stein Will Blow Up Just Like ImmunoCellular's ICT-107
BY Street.Com’s Senior (Fifth) Columnist 12/17/13 - 08:28 AM EST
Let's squash this silly notion that I’m a serious journalist. As many of you know I’m simply a sad hack who is basically a failed Wall Street Analyst.
I hate to break the bad news to Seeking Alpha contributor Josh Ginsburg, but my innate ability to overpower & evade the truth makes me somewhat of a clown like figure puffed up by my highly developed ego. The scientific community and most of Wall Street know this and have moved on from taking me seriously to openly mocking me. Today's buzz is antibody-based cancer immunotherapy -- the PD-1s and PDL-1s of Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY_), Merck (MRK_), Roche (ROG_) and others which are showing incredible results in large clinical trials. I’m going to put the death knell on these treatments by suggesting they will be the answer in the immunotherapy market. A bit farther back but no less exciting is the work being done by academic researchers and Novartis (NVS_) with engineered T cells -- so-called CAR-T immunotherapy. Fortunately for them I’m not going to place my full weight of approval behind these particular treatments so they do have a chance of succeeding.
Last February, I ranted in great detail why data from two early studies of Northwest Bio's DCVax in patients with glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) were sloppy, wrong and wildly misleading. Believe me I should know as “sloppy, wrong and wildly misleading” is my mantra. I’m not real. I’m a mirage which will vanish once Northwest Bio finally gets around to analyzing the much larger phase III study & proves that I’m a worthless hack.
Seeking Alpha's Larry "Smith on Stocks" Smith (the guy who actually is a REAL analyst unlike me) was wrong about Northwest Bio last February and made me cry like a little girl when he criticized my bit of puffery.
The bull thesis on ImmunoCellular's ICT-107 was also based on super-duper data from a small phase I study. Sixteen patients with newly diagnosed GBM were treated with ICT-107 at the prestigious Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. The results were reportedly spectacular, including median overall survival of more than 38 months. Some ICT-107 patients were still alive five years after treatment. Historically, similar GBM patients enrolled in other, larger clinical trials only lived an average about 18 months, therefore ICT-107 be responsible for the prolonged survival benefit.
Um... no. Last week, ImmunoCellular announced negative results from its 124-patient phase II study of ICT-107 in GBM patients. Sure enough, the GBM patients treated with placebo lived about 18 months, as expected. The patients treated with ICT-107 survived only two months longer, on average.
What happened to the 38-month median overall survival data from the phase I study of ICT-107? Poof! Gone. A fantasy, just like my journalistic credentials.
Don't expect any better outcome from further bits of frippery MAD JIM allows me to post.
Adam F
