PAR Investor Meeting - Questions from HC, page-64

Are you able to elaborate on why there is such an obsession with the peer review? I've tried to resist commenting on this in the past, but it appears there is far too greater emphasis on the peer review.

For those that do not understand the process, clinical trial results are written into a manuscript and then sent off to a journal where the manuscript is reviewed by people (referred to as reviewers) who are competent with the material submitted. For example, the manuscript could be sent to three reviewers with different backgrounds, all of whom are able to understand the content of the manuscript. Now these individuals may not necessarily be experts (depending on the journal the manuscript was submitted to), but the purpose of the peer review process is to make sure that what is being claimed in the article is a true representation of the data that has been submitted. So if PAR simply submit the results of the trial and interpret those results, then it'll be easily accepted. You can't challenge the results of the clinical trial. Any possible issues associated with the trial are just listed as limitations.

The tricky part is when you try to make claims that the data does not represent, for example claiming iPPS has DMOAD action. In this case the reviewers may request more information. You may also choose to submit your manuscript to multiple journals (one by one, not all at once) to benefit from the feedback generated from the peer review process. For instance, you could submit this manuscript to a journal to say iPPS has DMOAD action based on x, y, z, in which case the reviewers will probably respond by advising PAR that they need to generate biomarker and MRI data to prove DMOAD action. In the end, PAR can use this feedback when they go to the FDA and to advise on trial design or future studies.

Peer reviews usually take a long time precisely for this purpose (clinical trial results take longer to review), but the reality is it's easy to get a manuscript published. There are several workarounds, such as going to the editor to say reviewer A is being unreasonable etc and they'll just publish it. So i really don't get why there is such an obsession with the peer review?