How is it bad news? Oxygent was not even given to these patients, they just didn't have the failing health the study expected. I REPEAT, THESE PATIENTS DID NOT RECEIVE ANY OXYGENT, THUS OXYGENT WAS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE SUSPENSION! I'll be buying more. Oh well, I guess that market can't see this, even after a clear reuters release:
Alliance Suspends Trial, Shares Tumble
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Shares of Alliance Pharmaceutical Corp. tumbled on Tuesday after the company said it had suspended a trial of its experimental blood substitute product because of unexpectedly few side effects seen in a control group of cardiac patients not receiving the synthetic product.
Alliance (NasdaqNM:ALLP - news) was down $4-9/16 to $2-15/16, or 61 percent, in morning trade on the Nasdaq.
The San Diego-based biotech firm said it had voluntarily suspended enrollment in the phase III study of its product, Oxygent, in cardiac surgery patients undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting procedures.
The study was designed to compare results between patients receiving Oxygent and a control group of patients not receiving the product, which is the only blood substitute in clinical development formulated from a synthetic raw material (emulsified perflubron).
It said the frequency of adverse events, particularly strokes, in the control group was ``remarkably low, causing a disparity in the proportion of adverse events between the treatment and control patients.''
The company said researchers have not attributed the adverse events to Oxygent, adding the blood substitute had already been evaluated in 19 clinical studies involving more than 1,400 subjects.
``Although the incidence of adverse events was within expectations in the treatment group, the imbalance versus the control group prompted us to suspend enrollment until we can analyze the data and determine why the discrepancy occurred,'' Duane Roth, chief executive of Alliance, said in a prepared release.
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