Did You Learn Something New?

In Dr. Ross' HemOnc Today presentation earlier this year, he asked three questions as a preface to his presentation, and then asked the audience to answer them again following the presentation. It took me a while to get this information.

As a preface to this post, allow me to blog the following:

• Craig will routinely and publicly say, as the CEO of a publicly traded biotechnology company, that his primary customers are the FDA and big pharma;
• He will talk about the importance of shareholders;
• Ultimately, during quiet moments, he will share his emotional views about patients, who the team earnestly and genuinely believe are the primary focus of their efforts; and,
• The medical and scientific communities to which much of the communications efforts of the company is targeted, to inform, to educate, and eventually to build a groundswell within the medical community (particularly the medical oncs, as the surgical oncs already have bought in) about the utility of PV-10.

With the above as context, it was striking to see the responses of the audience members to Dr. Ross' questions, pre- and post-presentation:

I would make the argument that OncoVex "won" question 2 simply because there has been much more publicity of the drug within the medical community, including the fact that BioVex (Amgen) already had enrolled patients in its Phase 3 trial at the time of Dr. Ross' presentation. Also, focus on the sentiment or message of the polls. I'm sure the number of responders and the accordant statistics (margin of error, etc.) can provide some basis for arguing with the voracity of the outcomes.

Pretty interesting results, eh? The reaction of doctors looking at intralesional therapy for local and distant disease, to their reaction of PV-10 itself.

While Dr. Ross appears to have been unbiased in his presentation, counting the number of slides related to PV-10 and the time he spoke about it would suggest he clearly is focusing on the intralesional therapy agent with the most potential (i.e., PV-10).

I thought I'd close this post with Dr. Ross' disclosure (apologies for not being able to take the screen shot as the presentation moved along, and avoid the play button in the middle of it).