Always Insist on Error Bars

That's the take-home of this post by Adam Feuerstein about La Jolla Pharmaceuticals and their kidney drug candidate GCS-100. It's a galectin inhibitor, and it's had a rough time in development. But investors in the company were cheered up a great deal by a recent press release, stating that the drug had shown positive effects. But look closer. The company's bar-chart presentation looks reasonably good, albeit with a binary dose-response (the low dose looks like it worked; the high dose didn't). But scroll down on that page to see the data expressed as means with error bars. Oh dear. . . Update: it's been mentioned in the comments that the data look better with standard error rather than standard deviations. Courtesy of a reader, here's the graph in that form. And it does look better, but not by all that much:
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Clinical Trials Source Type: blogs