allotment, page-54

unfortunately this is nonsense. If you have 100 people are on a drug and 87 get a response, and 100 people are on placebo and 63 get a response, then you might be getting somewhere near a statistically significant difference between the drug and placebo. If however you have 8 people on a drug and 7 get a response, and 8 people on placebo and 5 get a response, then there is clearly no statistical significance - it is very possible, even quite likely that the difference in response was due to chance.

The comment about relative potency is highly relevant. As I have explained before, 2 potent drugs on their own may be all that is needed to cure HCV in all patients. BIT225 is a relatively weak anti-HCV drug, and therefore even though it MAY have some effect in HCV (once an adequately-powered trial has demonstrated this - I am of the opinion that it probably does have a 1 log effect based on mechanism of action), it would probably need to be added to 2 other drugs to achieve cure. A 2 drug cocktail will generally be preferred to a 3 drug cocktail due to side effects, and all the big drug companies will be aware of this. So if a drug company is looking for an opportunistic pick-up then a potent drug is a much more likely candidate, even if it is in the same class of other agents already in development.

More data is required, and data costs money. A partnering agreement with a much larger company is what Biotron needs, and it is not in the position of strength a lot of posters presume.