IJ,
thanks for your summary of the medical press pieces stating potential positives for Xopenex. I agree it will be a while before the conservative medical establishment accepts the benefits (assuming they exist). People forget sometimes that medicine isn't chemistry or engineering, where mechanisms can be expected to be consistently repeatable. Humans react differently, and as a result, doctors are a pragmatic lot, relying on their experience with particular medications. So if Xopenex really is different, and SEPR can get practitioners to try it, then it will sell, regardless of what the FDA label says. Albuterol enjoys a good reputation among doctors, but if a patient complains of a bad reaction, I can see a physician ordering X instead, just to see what happens. He'd be familiar enough with the chemistry not to perceive any danger; he'd know from other isomer switches that the optically pure version can have very different effects. So he'd try it, and if it works well, he'd use it again on similar patients, and eventually, on all of them, if he felt it were a better drug.
That's the way I see it working. Which is why SEPR's agressive promotion is helpful, in that it could get doctors to at least try X. |
