Replies to post #5326 on Biotech Values

[randychub]

"It seems that the predictive value of RR is now routinely discounted in “targeted” therapies such as Tarceva, but RR is still believed to be predictive of survival for cytotoxics. Perhaps this conventional wisdom needs to be updated."

Are you sure your not a biotech analyst for someone. The medical director, Paul Keane, told me just today that he was at a meeting with several biotech analysts recently and that was the common thought at this meeting.

Randy

[poorgradstudent]

For the record, Allen's explanation that BMY dropped the drug because it was singularly focused on objective response rates really didn't go over with me. Basically, he was saying that BMY didn't bother to look at the survival data at all once they saw the response rates were unchanged. I find this type of talk to be common for drugs that have been cast off from big pharma and rescued by smaller biotechs.

Also, I'm not touting response rate as a 100% reliable predictor of clinical benefit. It is an arbitrary measure. However, for a drug that is hypothetically able to increase the time that a cytotoxic sticks around the cell, it is reasonable to expect an increase in RR. My preference would be to focus on the PFS data as a reliable predictor of survival. Anyways...

On another topic: Yes, you're quite right. AMEV was fiddling with the variable portion of antibodies in order to screen for better binding clones.