Biotech Values

[Summer2762]

$ARQL.

I hope the ARQL and Daiichi can figure out the proper subset of patients for which Tivantinib works. It is not as simple as Met high vs Met low.

Remember that for Met low patients (at Marquee), we had

Median OS for patients with MET Low NSCLC in the treatment arm was 8.5 months compared to 7.7 months in the control arm (hazard ratio = 0.90, p = 0.53), and median PFS for the treatment arm was 3.7 months compared to 1.9 months for the control arm (hazard ratio = 0.66, p = 0.006). ORR was 11.2 percent for patients with MET-low NSCLC in the treatment arm versus 5.5 percent in the control arm.

So the inclusion of Met low patients was not the reason this trial failed (at futility). Simply dropping them and rerunning the trial will not help.

The co still did not publish the data for the subset of patients for which we have no met status. However, it can easily inferred that those patients were the cause of the Marquee trials' failure. Why those patients did worse than any other subset? How and why not being able measure the met status correlated to lack of response to tivantinib? I can even make the claim that giving tivantinib to these patients was harmful (with statistical significance). It's been more than a year and I still have not heard a reasonable explanation.