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Biotech / Medical : VD's Model Portfolio & Discussion Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: scaram(o)uche who wrote (5847)	10/30/1998 3:22:00 PM
From: Rocketman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 9719

Opps, Rick you are correct, I meant Synergen. You are a much better biohistorian than I. I always remember they were in Boulder Colorado, but almost always screw up their name. Even though the Centocor HA-1A trial was halted due to higher recipient death than placebo death, this could still be due to non-randomness of the degree of illness. Sepsis suffers very greatly in the extremity of the illness and has an inherently high fatality rate. But there is no good way to predict who is the sickest and predict survival. If the test group had a disproportionately higher number of sicker patients more prone to death than those in the placebo group then that could explain the higher death rate, especially given the small sample sizes. As I recall, this came down to a relatively few individuals who died. But Centocor had no means to better qualify the patients to split them between the groups so they had to abandon the drug. This has been the sepsis drug dilemma, it is hard to get a consistant pool of patients to split into the test versus placebo groups. If XOMA has a good predictor of clinical outcome, they stand a much better chance of making truly randomized patient pools and hence a better chance of showing statistical significance. This gives them a much better chance of successful clinicals. Rman