Replies to post #19165 on Biotech Values

[DewDiligence]

>Quiz - The software industry would be one possibility. A less obvious guess might be the extremely profitable porn industry…<

No (but good guess) on the software industry; I suspect that there are a lot of barely-profitable software houses that pull down the average. No (but good guess) on the porn industry because the survey didn’t include porn as one of the surveyed industries. (I don’t think there are any large public companies with porn as their main business segment.)

[DewDiligence]

Re: EPIX

>Another possibility is that the agency has an ax to grind with Epix or their partner Schering for some reason, or perhaps the FDA fears that the widespread use of enhanced MRA will help further bankrupt the Medicare system cost-wise.<

MRA’s ought to be cheaper than angiography and hence, unless doctors were ordering them willy-nilly (which wouldn’t be covered by anyone), MRA’s could potentially lower healthcare costs.

>Either way, Epix is getting the shaft big time…<

It would appear so.

[iwfal]

Either way, Epix is getting the shaft big time, and doctors and patients in the US will be denied a very useful new technology for no good reason.

I'd reserve judgement until you see the FDA's side of it. It is possible that the FDA is screwing the company (although I have serious doubts about the reasons you hypothosize). But I have found many instances where the company claimed they were being screwed, but when you see the FDA's side of it you realize that the company was not telling the whole story. That they forgot something important in their protocol (e.g. Genasense which had a bias in when TTP was measured which invalidated their TTP measurement), or that they spun the endpoints that they made (e.g. Citiclone).

One of the problems with calibrating the FDA is that you only get to see the FDA's side of it when the drug is eventually approved or when it makes it as far as an AC.