| | | I hope you're right, Peter. I agree that there's been little on patient boards about the pulmonary issues, which helps ease my mind. But we didn't read much patient chatter about pona's issues either, at least until the blow up. Of course, those side effects were slower to develop and their origins more complex. Nonetheless, if there are any serious safety signals in the ALTA data, the FDA is going to slap another black box warning on brigatinib, which will hurt sales badly against the two already approved second-line drugs.
I've been invested in this company for twenty years, and although I've been through many ups and downs during that time, the most recent few months have been some of the toughest. Love or hate Harvey Berger, at least he did keep firm control of the company and he had a vision for what he wanted it to become. Right now, I sense Ariad is floundering in very rough seas. If they aren't able to land a good bid and sell (assuming that's what they're trying to do), and if pona's revenues continue to stagnate, cash is going to become an issue fairly soon.
You've posted on the BV board that the new pona/nilotinib head-to-head trial is a waste of time and money, and you would have preferred they go after second-line failures, since there isn't a lot of competition out there in that population. But won't those second-line failures eventually become pona patients anyway, due to the lack of options? Doctors are going to figure out that when most patients fail on nilotinib, it doesn't work to go to dasatinib (or vice versa)--they're better off going to pona. I don't think they need a trial for that, it's just going to happen over time--assuming safety data from OPTIC is better and pona retains most of its efficacy with lower doses, which seems likely based on earlier data subsets.
It seems to me that Ariad is better served taking a shot with the new trial as designed, since that gives them the widest potential patient pool. I have to assume that they've done some pretty deep number crunching and are confident that they can beat nilotinib in efficacy and at least come out comparable in safety at these lower doses. Of course, management has taken some pretty staggering missteps before, so maybe I'm assuming too much. |
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