For Immediate Rewording. Uh, Release.

Here's a nice look at why you should always think about the source of the financial and business information you read. It details the response to a recent Pfizer press release about palbociclib, a CDK inhibitor that's in late clinical trials. Someone at The Wall Street Journal wrote that it had "the potential. . .to transform the standard of care for post-menopausal women with ER+ and HER2- advanced breast cancer." Problem is, that phrase was lifted directly out of the press release itself (and sure sounds like it), and you really would hope for better from the WSJ. What we're seeing here is actually Pfizer's own spin on the (as yet unpresented) results of the PALOMA-1 clinical trial. Everything a company says at this point will be couched in terms of "could" and "has the potential" and "we hope", and will come with one of those paragraphs at the end about "forward-looking statements". When it comes to the first statements about clinical trials results, if there are no numbers, there is nothing to talk about. Paul Raeburn, the Knight Science Journalism blog author who picked up on this, also found that someone at the AP (and others) went for Pfizer's spin, too: The problem is that this story was covered by business reporters rather than medical reporters, who by and large are too smart to fall for a company's claim about a drug without seeing the evidence presented, reviewed, and debated. The further problem is that because they are so smart, medical writers mostly declin...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Cancer Source Type: blogs