Re your <<What was the patient population in the 141W94 + 3TC + AZT trial? Were these early patients naive to therapy, or had they been pre-treated with AZT or AZT + 3TC?>>
Basically, as I read the press releases, these patients have been pretreated with either AZT or AZT+3TC. IMO this makes the results not so bad. Also, the results are of course for all three doses tried. One of the purposes of the trial was to get the dosage correct, so it is entirely possible that the lower doses were worse than the higher doses. This was not mentioned in the press report.
Also, the press report did not differentiate between viral loads, amount of pretreatment, and did not mention the severity of the side effects, so there is much that is not known.
Still... I think the Vertex crowd was hoping for something better, and that if there was a dose that delivered a 100% knockout, it would have been mentioned in the press release, unless they are really conservative over there. I don't think that the Vertex drug can be dismissed yet, but I agree with John W. that it is looking less formidable than the whispers about it would have indicated. |
