He does not know his "stuff" and it is a shame that I am being attacked for posting mt opinions and facts that don't waver in accordance with the stock price. It is also unfortunate only a few here will disclose their actual interest in the stock. However, I do appreciate all the good samaritans that relentlessly spend enormous time here on the thread just to enhance the public knowledge like henry and david..
Congratulations henry, David S. has made an alliance with you. I am grateful for your contributions, especially of your criticism of Dr. Ho ("ovely optimistic"). I tend to value the opinions of the Aaron Diamonds AIDS Research center over that of Henry:
Now lets look at what the real experts who know there "stuff" have to say regarding the UCSF study quoted from a Brown Brothers Harriman analyst note (10/1):
" We asked several leading authorities their opinion of the data presented Monday at the Late Breaker session (LB-5). In this study, Viracept treatment failures were switched to a second line of therapy. The result in most of the 12 patients was little reduction in viral load. Some had seen this as evidence of cross resistance, which would contradict earlier data showing successful treatment of Viracept failures with other protease inhibitors. As discussed in yesterday's First Call Note, we did not agree with this conclusion and found the study design to disagree with the recommended treatment method. The leading authorities we had consulted disagreed with the conclusion as well.
Dr. Martin Markowitz of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center made several points:
First, the patients in the study were recruited when other protease inhibitors were available, so it is questionable whether the patients truly were naive to protease inhibitors as the author states. (Due to the seriousness of AIDS and the desperation of the patients, it was not uncommon at that time to find patients who tried new drugs on their own and did not report the experience to the investigators.)
Second, the patients had been heavily treated with Nucleoside drugs. Since the virus mutates around nucleoside therapy, the triple drug cocktail they were given was essentially monotherapy. Monotherapy falters fast and is likely to fail with multiple mutations, which would likely render subsequent therapy ineffective.
Furthermore, the patients were allowed to return to their baseline viral load level before switching therapy, which created a population of multi-resistant virus.
Dr. John Mellars of the University of Pittsburgh said that Viracept failure will be more savageable if it is stopped as soon as failure is apparent. He pointed out that when the doctor waits a long time, as in the LB-5 paper, a second round of therapy doesn't work. He agreed that one cannot wait for multiple resistance to form, and said that the virus must be hit with a second therapy quickly. Dr. Mellars pointed out that in a study to be presented today by Dr. Keith Henry, Viracept failures were stopped early and had a good response from the second line of treatment: the opposite of teh LB-5 study. We will report on that study after it is presented."
Facts are a hard thing to swallow for the newcomers, almost as hard as 18 pills a day. |
