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Biotech / Medical : Ligand (LGND) Breakout! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: WTDEC who wrote (29964)	1/8/2000 4:18:00 PM
From: Henry Niman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 32384

Walter, I think that the testimonials give a much better feel for what the patients and MDs thought of the treatment. The best exchange came on the quality of life. A arbitrary cutoff was used to define "responders" and "non-responders". Since there was no control (patients who didn't get Targretin), the responders were compared to the non-responders. However, since many patients in both categories had an improvement in their quality of life, the results became TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE!: DR. YOCUM: In general, it shows a greater degree of improvement for the responder group than you might expect for the nonresponder group. But by many of those measures, actually most, there is still a trending of improvement for the nonresponders. DR. SIMON: Well, I mean, it's a double-edged sword. It just may indicate that your response assessment isn't really meaningful. In other words, if you're getting some nonstatistically significant difference at 4 weeks, if the main difference is what's happening at 4 weeks and there's no major difference between what's happening for the responders as for the nonresponders, it may indicate that your response assessment isn't really picking up anything really of symptomatic importance. DR. DUVIC: No. DR. SIMON: I don't know. All I wanted you to do is to -- whether you have any additional information that from all of the quality of life assessment did, that indicates, other than your case studies, that there's symptomatic benefit. DR. DUVIC: It means that the people who are getting drug who don't make it to the cutoff for response are also deriving benefit from the drug. DR. SIMON: Well, we don't know what it means because you don't have the control group. DR. DUVIC: Well, I can tell you because I took care of the patients. DR. SIMON: Well, you didn't have a control group, so you don't really know what it means.