Replies to post #217599 on NorthWest Biotherapeutics Inc (NWBO)

[flipper44]

If anyone would know in Germany, he would.

I don’t know. I saw that the patient was being treated in Dresden.
The medical center in Dresden was the first site to open in Germany, which was initiated in late May 2014.

Maybe the lady got an honest answer to her question from Prof. Dr. Dietmar Krex, senior neurosurgeon at the Department of Neurosurgery, University Hospital of Dresden, Germany, and Medical Advisor to NW Bio's Hospital Exemption program. -- Lykiri

[ADVFN_doclee]

I can hardly think that the placebo arm of this trial would simply be to withold the injection of DCVax.
I have always understood that both arms of a placebo-controlled trial had to be identical except for the actual agent. Those who were assigned to the active arm got the active drug whilst those assigned to the placebo arm were given a superficially identical treatment but with no active agent.
One of the problems of making this a placebo-controlled trial was the development of a suitable placebo which was sufficiently like the real stuff so that nobody could tell which injection was DCVax and which was placebo.
Simply not giving a treatment immediately negates such a trial as everybody, and especially the patient, knows that they are getting no treatment and so there cannot be a placebo effect in the first place. So, there would be no placebo arm - just a no treatment arm. There would be nothing to assess the placebo effect and nobody would really know just how much of the observed benefit of a treatment was due to the active agent being trialled and how much benefit was due to the placebo effect.

[meirluc]

Thank you Lykiri. That the German lady was "almost sure" and not 100% sure that her husband was targeted to receive the placebo treatment makes me wonder whether she really got a straight answer from her physician.

A wife of a patient excluded from a trial may want to reassure her husband and herself that they may not have missed very much, hence their preferred opinion would be that he would have been part of the placebo group.

I am of course just guessing here but the "almost certain (fast sicher) that it would have been placebo" suggests that she did not get a straight answer.