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Biotech / Medical : IDPH--Positive preliminary results for pivotal trial of ID -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bob L who wrote (1672)	7/15/1999 12:11:00 AM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1762

Thanks Bob, <5 Dec 1998...Since its approval in November 1997, for the treatment of patients with relapsed or refractory low-grade or follicular, CD20 positive, B-cell non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, approximately 70 cases of serious infusion-related events have been reported out of an estimated 12,000 to 14,000 patients that have been treated with rituximab worldwide. The labeling for RITUXAN (rituximab) will be revised to reflect this new information...> So I guess the total number treated now is about 14,000 plus 10,000, = 25,000 [more or less]. That makes the treatment expensive since from the latest report, IDEC is now selling at the rate of $300m per year at present. <...Per treatment $6000 [but that's from a poor memory] so about 50,000 people per year are being treated [give or take a few retreatments and maybe the price is a bit higher and maybe there are a lot of free treatments under IDEC's help-the-poor scheme where a proportion of sales are given in needy cases, again just my fuzzy memory].> As you say, Dr Saven of Scripps, who told me in Feb 1998 that he had had a couple of cases of tuberculosis subsequent to Rituxan treatment, is not matching the trend. It seems the deaths were partly due to a casual approach to infusion and monitoring of patients. Given the statistics on infusion related problems, I don't believe there were two tuberculosis related infections [unless they were AIDS patients who might already have been involved with tuberculosis which flared up afer treatment]. Do you happen to know what the off-label treatments [30%] are for? CD20 Intermediate Grade? Maurice PS: Thanks Bob for the off-label answer next post! In conjunction with chemotherapy presumably for low grade CD20 NHL whereas on-label is for sole use of Rituxan I suppose.