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

To: Gregory Rasp who wrote (1471)	2/5/1998 12:05:00 PM
From: contrarian	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1762

Here are the Q497 Earnings. IDEC made profit because of a milestone payment of 15 million from Genetech when Rituxan was approved by FDA. Statement reads with guarded optimism. Looks good. biz.yahoo.com Contrarian

To: Gregory Rasp who wrote (1471)	2/6/1998 4:20:00 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 1762

Thanks Greg for providing the information on the trials. I'll digest it. A first pass comment is that the statistical basis for analysis is pretty thin. For example, the number of patients with a 1 cm lump at age 21 wasn't defined. 97% 4 year survival for some groups?! That seems much too high. You commented: "The real problem for Rituxan is proof that it improves survival." It is proven that Rituxan does big damage to particular cell types - namely CD20. While there might not have been long term studies, the old story applies - absence of proof is not proof of absence. Since it has been proven to do major damage to cancer cells and shrinks tumors so much it can't help but improve survival times. There is apparently little risk from Rituxan. If there are only 3,141,592 cells left, there is a good chance that Rituxan will get them all. If there are only 50 cancer cells left, then the chances of getting every one are really good. Even if Rituxan couldn't get them all, the shrunken tumor would take time to grow back sufficiently to kill the person. Ergo, their survival time is improved. It baffles me that a doctor could refrain from using Rituxan. If I had somebody in front of me who had a 20% chance of dying after all the proven tricks of my trade have been used and I had this harmless stuff I could give them [morbity of maybe 1 in 1000 for healthy young people as a wild guess] which would prolong their life by shrinking their tumors and in very early stage cases probably contributing to normal life expectancy by killing the last few cells remaining after conventional therapy, then I can't think of any reason to not give it to them. Yes, it isn't proven to cure that particular person. But it can never be proven that a particular person will be cured by any of the treatments; just a statistical approximation can be given. But the class of people = CD20 are proven to benefit by substantial cancer cell destruction in most cases. For very low level cancer, there must be an improved prospect of the last cancer cell being killed. As the number of cells increases, the prospects of getting them all rapidly decrease, the same as for the chemotherapies. DMB, I'll report back on how we get on. I agree that 3CHOP plus emr seems good as per those trials. But why not add Rituxan at the tail end in case there were a few escapee cells from the emr and cyclophosphamide brew? No harm being done and something like 20% - 30% residual mortality risk after CHOP and emr still threatening. Maurice