That was one of the most amusing posts I have seen...ever. Let us suspend higher cortical processing for a moment and speculate....if one were truly trying to move valued assets out of IPIC into ITRC for example, why would IPIC signal their intentions by starting with a minimal value asset like Transcell? I'll tell you what; if we see a press release announcing that InterCardia has purchased the rights to CerAxon and pagoclone, allowing Interneuron to focus all of its energies upon PMS Escape.....then we can pursue this particular rich fantasy together.
For those more interested in science rather than science fiction, I would note a paper that is going to be presented at the American Heart Association next week. Its authors are associated with the Framingham Heart Study, the epic longitudinal cardiac health research project. They did echocardiograms ( before the fluramine issue emerged this summer) on approximately 3500 men and women, excluding any who had diagnosed coronary disease/heart failure. Interestingly, they found that 10.5% of that population had observable aortic regurgitation. They concluded, and I quote one sentence of the abstract from this paper by Jagmeel, Evans, et al; "A substantial proportion of healthy men and women have detectable valvular regurgitation." Now I would add a cautionary note, the mean age for this large sample was around 55, thus to the extent age is a factor, this may influence this figure.
However, we are talking about a far higher incidence of baseline valvular anomalies than anticipated (the FDA had cited 1-2% when claiming a fifteenfold increase in the odds of valvular anomalies associated with fluramines). And since Body Mass Index was not positively correlated with valvular regurgitation in the Framingham report, one cannot presume that they somehow had found 10.5% of the group using a fluramine drug. Integrate the recent WSJ sampling of diet doctors who reported an 8% rate of echocardiogram anomalies in fluramine users, with this higher than predicted baserate in the general population, and one ends up with what appears to be a wash, a correlational and liability non-event.
Please note that this is not yet definitive; until we have a quality double blinded drug vs. non-drug study completed in 1Q:98, this evidence remains circumstantial. But corporate Armageddon is hardly in the cards.
Thank you for sharing that link. It made Seinfeld look like an Ingmar Bergman film. NeuroInvestment |
