$10 Billion Deal, page-1189

Just reposting my reply to @pationit that was removed minus the unimportant speculation.

I am not ignoring it as it in not unknown. MM was very specific in what data is to be withheld and what data is still yet to be released. There is no other data. The pharmacology data to be withheld is not of any importance in a positive sense (it could be negative which we could talk about if people want), while the data that was supposed to be released has still not been released more than 9 months later.

What could this missing assay data show under the most optimistic view? Since it was limited to the cells found in the blood it at best could show that BIT225 made HIV undetectable in blood monocytes (macrophages are not found in the blood). It couldn't tell us anything about what was happening in tissue macrophages since they were not sampled. Only around 10% of monocytes found in the blood can be infected by HIV and those that are infected are hard to detect even in untreated HIV patients. They become almost impossible to detect in patients on cART which is one of the reasons that HIV infection in the monocyte lineage (i.e. macrophages, etc) has been studied so little. It is a really technically hard area to study.

BIT is trying to use a new unproven assay to show a negative (i.e. no HIV infection of monocytes) in a sample (blood) where nearly every cell is not infected. It is not surprising that we have not got the results from this assay.