Help me come in off the ledge.. I keep reading posts that argue that a decision to kill the trial for futility would have been easy if the data pointed to that result. Hell, even I've argued that it would be unethical to hold off on a futility announcement since lives literally hang in the balance. People have the right to know if they have any hope of benefiting from a treatment. But as this draws out I wonder how easy would that decision really be? I actually think it would be very hard. If the trial was killed then NWBO is toast and most likely Cognate too. There is a lot of people and institutions involved in this treatment. All that has made me think that the delay is just as likely because of negative findings as it is positive findings. Perhaps the statistical group is revisiting the data (mining the data) for some benefit to some subgroup to justify going forward? I know there has already been a lot of discussions that this was already the plan, to look at subgroups. But it's always easier to try and draw correlations (fit the data) when it's in front of you're face. If it weren't for all of the positive movement in the last 12 months (expansion in Europe, expanded manufacturing agreement, Direct trial, uptick in institutional and individual investment, large ASCO presence and other indicators that I'm forgetting) I would be very concerned at this point. In summary, I don't buy, nor do I think anyone else should buy, that taking a long time rules out a bad result. I still think it's about a 50/50 shot at this point.
Has anyone else considered this? Any logical arguments to why I'm wrong are most welcome.
