Replies to post #155230 on Biotech Values

[poorgradstudent]

FWIW, I think they indicated in a prior call that telomeres are very short in MF patients; seemed to suggest the drug might even work better in MF. Also, they said in a prior call that imetelstat produced stat sig PFS results in the NSCLC trial in the subset of patients that had short telomeres. So, may still be hope in solid tumors too.

Well, they mentioned in this webcast that in MF / ET / PV the telomeres are pretty much always short. But then that makes stratifying a trial based on telomere length a whole different proposition. For example, in NSCLC, as you mentioned, they did the post-hoc analysis to show the difference between short and longer telomere subgroups. But if the MF / ET / PV cohort is primarily short, then what? Do they stratify short versus shorter?

Dunno. That part seems a bit confusing to me. It would have been nice if they had telomere length versus molecular response for the ET cohort. Then we could start to make some better guesses!

As for NSCLC, from my perspective this is partner territory. It sounds like a money / time sink to me.