Immune Response falls on arbitration news

IMNR was off $1.438 (23 percent) to $4.625 on Wednesday and lost $39.4 million of its market cap, which dropped to $126.8 million from $166.2 million, following Tuesday's announcement that it had begun binding arbitration proceedings in a dispute with the University of California at San Francisco over the public disclosure of clinical data by UCSF investigator James Kahn in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association. IMNR contends that data from the 2,527-patient Phase III study of its Remune HIV-1 immunogen should not have been published until all of the clinical investigators in the trial had an opportunity to review and agree on a manuscript.

IMNR, which has asked for $7-$10 million in damages resulting from such publication, said it began arbitration based on the refusal of the university researchers to include in the publication data on what IMNR said was a significant viral load benefit and helper T cell response seen with Remune in a prospective 250-patient subset in the trial. In the JAMA article, however, the researchers wrote that no significant differences were seen between Remune and placebo in that patient subset. The university told BioCentury that IMNR's analysis of the subset data was considered invalid by the JAMA paper's authors. In addition, the university said that IMNR withheld final patient follow-up data from the trial, making such data unavailable for the publication. ...