It seemed pretty clear to me throughout the call that he was saying there was no signal of anything different in terms of AEs from commercial patients vs. PACE patients. I am not convinced that this is an undisciplined or dumb way of stating things.
That being said, I am overall neutral on the call. I don't think it was meandering: Berger gave his prepared remarks for a couple of minutes, which were pretty to-the-point and linear, and then opened the floor to a slew of analyst questions. The analyst questions were much more 'all over the place' of course, but I think this is true of just about any analyst Q&A.
On the other hand, I think I agree that without the hard numbers, I am struggling to understand the real value of this call. Superficially, the stock had a small bounce-back today, but not sure how much of that can be attributed directly to the call. I do think there was some interesting new data that he disclosed; particularly that 1/4th of patients so far are second-line. I think that is a fairly good sign. And honestly, I think when you look at there having been 325 patients, not including the starter sample program patients, that appears to be a pretty strong uptake for the first quarter.
Overall, I think there were some good things and some bad things, and in the end, my outlook isn't really affected by the call. I still think Iclusig sales will meet or beat consensus, and I would be highly surprised if the EPIC trial did not meet the primary endpoint at the interim analysis. I suppose the question about tolerability in the frontline setting is an open question that only data will answer, but if I had to guess, I would guess that it will likely be on par with the 2G TKIs - relatively safe with some 'unique' AEs that make it less suitable for some patients with certain risk factors.
In an unscripted q&a you have to cut a little slack. Measured responses are required but this q&a went on a long time and covered a lot of topics. If he didn't word something completely correctly it's not that terrible of an occurrence.