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Biotech / Medical : InterMune (nasdaq)ITMN -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IRWIN JAMES FRANKEL who wrote (188)	3/13/2002 7:28:47 AM
From: IRWIN JAMES FRANKEL	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 508

I wrote this for RB in response to the Mayo study being commented on in the Fortune article. =========== OT: ITMN - Thanks Dave, That is a very interesting article. It is also inacurate and very misleading. The shorts must have fed that one to the Fortune. A few comments. I have the abstract in front of me. The Mayo work was presented at CHEST in November of 2001. I was there in Philly. It created quite a stir since it was inconsistent with other research. The Mayo work is a meta study. They did not do a study with any of the normal safegaurds. In fact, all they did is go back into the treatment records and look for qualified criteria and put what ever they could find together to see if they found a pattern. I do not know where Fortune gets the idea 59 people were treated. I quote from the abstract, "17 patients ... were identified as being treated with interferon-gamma 1b ... All had been ... diagnosed with IPF/UIP" They also comment that the subjects "were also more functionally impaired and may have been at a more advanced stage in their disease." This last statement MAY account for the result. There seems to be a point of no return after which Actimune does not work. The study is a shot across the bow and of some concern to ITMN holders. BTW, this study was quoted extensively in my writeup of CHEST. ij