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Make Room on Your Calendar 20 Dec for the Live Webcast of the FDA Ampligen Hearing

Try to leave your calendar open from 8am-5pm EST on the 20th for the FDA's hearing in Ampligen!

Information about the meeting is available at December 20, 2012 Meeting of the Arthritis Drugs Advisory Committee (not mistitled!).

The webcast will take place at https://collaboration.fda.gov/aac122012/ and Phoenix Rising will attempt to embed the video locally to make it easier to simultaneously watch and comment.

We'd appreciate it if pre-meeting discussion can be kept to the forum thread from this post, just to make life easier for the moderators (and to keep from having to merge a zillion discussion threads)

We'll make another post the day of the meeting for discussion about the meeting as occurs…so take some time on the 20th to join in the discussion here/in the forums or in chat!

See you on the 20th!
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Excellent overview Cort, will be following this closely come Thursday.
I know Dr. Kogelnik (as a patient, seen him a few times) and hope his 50% guesstimation of Ampligen FDA approval is on the low side.
 
I'm afraid the FDA background report for the committee released yesterday was very critical and does not bode well for Ampligen's approval.. Ampligens stock dropped almost 50% when it was released...Its going to be rough.
 
CONCLUSION from FDA prelim review
"In summary, CFS is a serious, life threatening and unmet medical need. There are currently no FDA approved products specifically for the treatment of CFS. Ampligen has the potential to be a positive therapeutic option for patients with CFS who do not have an alternative to directly treat the condition. Given the overwhelming physical and cognitive health issues; the decrease in activities of daily living and overall lack of quality of life associated with CFS, Ampligen clearly represents a clinically meaningful advance for a significant unmet medical need, and the weight of evidence supports FDA goals to advance treatment for chronically ill patients with severe debilitating, life threatening, conditions such as severe CFS.
It can be stated that the burden of the symptoms associated with CFS is greater than any risks associated with Ampligen, since a CFS sufferer’s life may be at risk for years of debilitation often followed by premature death."
 
Here's a good article that puts the FDA report in context. As the writer states,

"The problems facing Ampligen-or any putative therapy for CFS for that matter, is that the underlying cause(s) are unknown. As a result, there are quite possibly distinct sub-groups within any potential CFS study population with markedly distinct pathophysiologies, and hence efficacy measures would need to be tailored to the sub-group.

"Ampligen's trials had no way to account for this meta-population problem beyond looking for interesting trends within the data set. And that is what they did. In the briefing documents, the FDA referred to these statistical tests as a means for "hypothesis generating", not efficacy testing. As you can see this is a circular argument. No one seems to know what an appropriate biomarker for the general CFS population is, but the FDA is holding Ampligen up to an unrealistic standard nonetheless. In the end, HEB did find statistical support that Ampligen provides a biologically meaningful impact on the lives of at least some patients with CFS."

and

"Hemispherx is thus being penalized for the scientific community's willful ignorance on CFS for decades, and not being rewarded for taking a major risk of pushing Ampligen through clinical trials."


http://seekingalpha.com/article/1072481-hemispherx-faces-fda-day
 
"Hemispherx is thus being penalized for the scientific community's willful ignorance on CFS for decades, and not being rewarded for taking a major risk of pushing Ampligen through clinical trials."

Actually, if you'll read the FDA document that was released yesterday, it's clear that the exact opposite it true.

Hemispherx refused to comply to the FDA's 2009 request for a new, larger and longer trial, and instead manipulated the results from two earlier trials. They're pissed at the way the Hemispherx may have withheld information about adverse effects, removed like 20 or so patients from the original analysis to make the outcomes look better, etc..

If it isn't approved, I wouldn't blame the FDA, but instead ask Hemispherx why they didn't comply with the FDA's 2009 requests? Hopefully they'll be asked these questions tomorrow.

Here's a link to the FDA's analysis -- it doesn't look good at all -- and although this document is like 600 pages, just reading and skimming from about page 15 to page 30 will make it clear that they're not pleased with Hemispherx at all.

http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Adviso...rugs/ArthritisAdvisoryCommittee/UCM332514.pdf
 
"Hemispherx is thus being penalized for the scientific community's willful ignorance on CFS for decades, and not being rewarded for taking a major risk of pushing Ampligen through clinical trials."

Actually, if you'll read the FDA document that was released yesterday, it's clear that the exact opposite it true.

Hemispherx refused to comply to the FDA's 2009 request for a new, larger and longer trial, and instead manipulated the results from two earlier trials. They're pissed at the way the Hemispherx may have withheld information about adverse effects, removed like 20 or so patients from the original analysis to make the outcomes look better, etc..

If it isn't approved, I wouldn't blame the FDA, but instead ask Hemispherx why they didn't comply with the FDA's 2009 requests? Hopefully they'll be asked these questions tomorrow.

Here's a link to the FDA's analysis -- it doesn't look good at all -- and although this document is like 600 pages, just reading and skimming from about page 15 to page 30 will make it clear that they're not pleased with Hemispherx at all.

http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Adviso...rugs/ArthritisAdvisoryCommittee/UCM332514.pdf
Here's the problem. They ran out of money.

The first Ampligen trials were in 1988. Ampligen should have been fast-tracked approved in 1998 for this devastating orphan disease.

Hemispherx was the only company that took a gamble on us. Like a lawsuit that drags on for years until one of the litigants is finally bankrupt, the FDA has slowly waged a war of attrition against Ampligen over nearly 25 years, in concert with agencies like the CDC led by Bill Reeves who aggressively promoted CBT/GET despite ANY lack of evidence they objectively improve function or help anyone.
 
Also, the definition of "statistically significant" in science is arbitrary, defined as a p<0.05

The initial Ampligen results are called "insignificant" by the FDA because they had a p=0.10.

What this actually means is that there is a 10% chance the results are explained by chance, and a 90% chance Ampligen is effective.

That is not good enough for most clinical trials, but FDA should make an exception and grant PROVISIONAL APPROVAL because ME/CFS patients have no other prospects and Hemispherx had to go into this blind with no idea how to measure outcomes. The company should be rewarded because they took a risk and found something that very likely helps some people. :)
 
Dr. Snell is here! I thought he was going to speak in the first section but he didn't. The Hemispherx team did run long; it may be that he lost his slot but we'll see...he's their ace on exercise testing -which the committee does not know much about.

One of the discussion questions specifically refers to ETT I believe -so I think he will get his chance...