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Biotech / Medical : XOMA. Bull or Bear? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: aknahow who wrote (10776)	7/14/1999 1:54:00 PM
From: Cacaito	Respond to of 17367

Randomization implies non sequential order, it is a lottery type computer coding to assign patients to either treatment or placebo. One the cards are coded then they are randomly assigned to the pharmacists who will dispensed the assigned medication. The order could be like, 2 placebo, 3 bpi, one placebo 4 bpi. It could happen that one center only used placebo, or bpi (by chance). But the probabilities is that as one add patients the numbers will be about even. Flip a coin and make a sequence then separate the sequence by groups of smaller sequences and thats the idea. One wants to avoid strict order sequences, like bpi,placebo,bpi.... Any of the clinicians could start anotating odd numbers vs pairs and get the results early. Randomization of patients,drug,hospitals,and pharmacists, plus blindness of clinicians will avoid that. Xoma could have the results unblinded earlier for mortality, lets say at 28 days, and keep the 90 days follow up blind (better if predetermined) and the neurological follow up clinicians are kept "blind". Someone mentioned a Rick Harmon? comments about the Amgen TnF blocker for arthritis (Immunex alreday has Embrel in the market) for off label use with a cocktail at $40,000 for sepsis. This is just ridicoulous, the tnf blocker from Amgen sepsis trial (before it was an amgen drug) placebo did better than the drug.