setting the record straight, page-3

There is a lot of nonsense in that response. The least of which is that Marc Sinatra is commenting on medical science with a presumption of understanding, yet isn't capable of recognising that the 78 search results for "mesoblast" on pubmed have nothing to do with the company MSB, but actually relate to the type of embryological cell from which MSB derived their name.

HC users, do not underestimate the degree of error involved in that little search by itself: This is akin to typing your first name into google and assuming every result has something to do with you. It is ridiculous.

Also on that note, the comment: "By way of example, there appear to be only three papers in the published literature on Acrux’s (ASX: ACR) and Eli Lilly’s (NYSE: LLY) product, Axiron, and all three have appeared post the product’s approval by the US Food and Drug Administration."

Axiron is the trade name. Mr. Sinatra. That's why it only appears post-approval: Because that's when they started marketing it under that name. You'd actually want to search "topical testosterone", for which you get many more results - including trial results on which the approval was based.

This is not difficult - at all - and that someone with a Bachelor of Science with Honours in Genetics doesn't recognise that typing the name of an embryological cell type on PubMed will return results about that cell line, and not publications by a company which derives its name from it, is appalling. Not unheard of - I know of a few other bright people who, despite their honours degrees in medical science, aren't very good at medical science - but appallingly wrong.



Regarding failure to publish: It is not acceptable to use unpublished data which has not been peer reviewed as evidence of a treatment's efficacy. Results for which we cannot check the data are results you can expect scientists to dismiss outright. Why? Science relies on publicly verifiable data.

Furthermore, excusing an unexplained positive endpoint produced by data mining as an acceptable means by which to say a clinical trial has been sucessful is blatantly wrong. To top it off, attempting to claim that doing so is acceptable due to the cost of the study permitting data mining is a terrible excuse. The article itself explains why: "Based on accepted scientific practice, one in every 20 analyses will return an erroneous statistically significant result".

Let's say you have thirty different pieces of data. Age, gender, smoking history, the occurrence of a cardiac event, and more. Performing all the possible correlations between any two of those thirty pieces of data would result in hundreds of analyses. You can't just throw numbers in, see what falls out, and call that a result. Again because to quote from above: "the experiment (or study) must be repeated with that particular variable as a primary output (i.e. endpoint) before any conclusion can be reached".

But that hasn't been done, and it doesn't really matter, because we don't even have the data from the study to analyse anyway! Why? Because MSB hasn't released the results, they haven't been peer reviewed, and they aren't published where other scientists like myself can access them - because apparently if they are, MSB would somehow lose their "Competitive Advantage" relating to their proprietary treatment?

I honestly can't believe Lodge Partners has a biotech advisor who thinks searching "mesoblast" on pubmed will show the results for MSB's studies.