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

To: tuck who wrote (11073)	3/30/2004 1:05:32 PM
From: Biomaven	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 52153

tuck, I used to own SUPG, but it went in my last few months' culling. The company tends to push the envelope with its releases, so I always eye them with some degree of caution. So I basically chickened out. MDS is a pretty large (50k patients) under-served population. The FDA not so long ago gave Pharmion's Vidaza priority review for this indication. Vidaza is also an hypomethylating agent, apparently quite similar to Dacogen. Dacogen is a very interesting drug - I think the true promise of this class will emerge when they are combined with HDAC agents. (If I recall the details correctly, there was an interesting pre-clinical abstract at ASH combining Dacogen with Valproic acid, an existing anti-epilepsy drug that turns out to be an HDAC inhibitor.) Peter

To: tuck who wrote (11073)	3/31/2004 6:36:42 AM
From: bio_kruncher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 52153

I am not following this but it seems interesting. The release of results based on only the 45 first patients is to me clearly inappropriate for a time to event analysis. So either they didn't know what they were doing or tried to do a big spin. So when they got 'caught' or realized the mistake they needed to issue the clarification. The full KM curves look pretty good to me showing median survival of about 330 days vs 200. (I am not sure why Supergen state there is no formal calculated median from KM analysis as there clearly is and I'm not sure ever seen results presented from these types of analyses without the medians)However because the curves do not separate until 100 days it is more dificult to show statistical significance. Also the number of patients (170) is a bit small and underpowered to find significance for differences like those above. They must have been expecting bigger median differences. My guess is they will show impressive median diferences but fail to reach statistical significance.