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Biotech / Medical : Biotech Valuation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Miljenko Zuanic who wrote (8821)	7/14/2003 7:53:25 PM
From: Biomaven	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 52153

Miljenko, The study you quoted was for "asymptomatic" HRPC - my guess is that they were simply not as sick as those in the SPPI trial - certainly the control group statistics support this. Also, my impression is (and maybe Stefaan can confirm this) that the US uses hormonal treatment earlier and more aggressively than is the case in Europe. Perhaps that might also explain some difference - the one trial was European, the other US. Peter

To: Miljenko Zuanic who wrote (8821)	7/14/2003 9:02:23 PM
From: Icebrg	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 52153

>> Sound to me that in SPPI trial placebo TTP and response (>50%) are on the low side than should be expected.>> The problem with this trial was that it was cut very short. So there was not a lot of power available. BMS had originally planned to enroll 380 patients, but stopped after only 50 had been recruited due to "a change in corporate priorities". There is a post-ASCO audio interview with Dr. Seizinger of GPC Biotech available at gpcbiotech.de where he talks (for about 15 minutes) about Satraplatin and the company's plans for the drug. One of the main take-home messages is that the reason they have chosen to run the trial on second-line hormone resistant prostate cancer patients is, that they believe this should be the "easiest" road to approval. Evidently they hope that an orally available platinum analogue will find a much wider use. I believe that the very heavy involvement of ex-BMS managers on both side of the deal (Raj and Luigi in Irvine and Dr. Rosenzweig in Munich) should be seen as a positive. Erik