Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Details of the failure



I have written already that Provenge is not able to become a new Black Swan in cancer treatment. The idea behind the product is unique but we are living in the world of evidence based medicine and the beautifulness of the idea is not enough to generate a Black Swan…  Here you can find more details of the failure:

“The hypothesis, simply put, is that Provenge itself had no beneficial effect-that is, the treatment is effectively a placebo and the efficacy finding in the IMPACT trial was the result of placebo patients older than 65 being harmed by not getting a sufficient amount of their immune cells back. It is well-known that circulating white blood cells, or WBCs, are replaced in the body daily. So, the fact that Frovenge was administered a median of 5.7 months after randomization means that it had no effect on reversing any lost blood at the start of the treatment.
 

Next, if Provenge were just a placebo as Huber et al. claim, then Frovenge must be the same or worse.”

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