Great da­ta! Huge po­ten­tial! (Too bad it failed the pri­ma­ry end­point)

It’s not un­usu­al for a biotech to cher­ry pick the most promis­ing bits of da­ta from a clin­i­cal study and lead with its best re­sults when an­nounc­ing tri­al re­sults. So maybe it wasn’t too sur­pris­ing that it took a lit­tle pa­tience to find that Van­da Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals’ tradip­i­tant ac­tu­al­ly flunked the pri­ma­ry in a Phase II study for chron­ic itch among atopic der­mati­tis pa­tients.

Van­da ex­ecs had plen­ty of da­ta points to choose from. There was a big ad­van­tage over place­bo on Worst Itch Vi­su­al Ana­log Scale (VAS) — that made the head­line re­sults. But the pre-spec­i­fied pri­ma­ry end­point of Av­er­age Itch VAS?

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