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Biomira Announces Highlights of Today's Annual General and Special Meeting
Biomira Announces Highlights of Today's Annual General and Special Meeting.
About this update from Skrr Exploration, Inc.
[{"type":"text","content":"\n\n\n\n\nCompany Enormously Encouraged by L-BLP25 Phase IIb Results to Date\n\nEDMONTON, May 18 /CNW/ - Biomira Inc. (Nasdaq:BIOM) (TSX:BRA) announced\nthe following highlights of today's Annual General and Special Meeting of its\nshareholders. The meeting was chaired by the Board Chairman, Eric E. Baker,\nand followed by an address by the Company President and CEO, Alex McPherson,\nMD, PhD.\nDr. McPherson's comments focused primarily on the Company's lead product\ncandidate, BLP25 Liposome Vaccine (L-BLP25) and other aspects of the corporate\nstrategic focus.\n\"We are enormously encouraged with the data that came out in\nDecember 2004, from our last formal analysis of the Phase IIb study in \nnon-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), which was a protocol specified survival\nupdate,\" said Alex McPherson. The details of this survival update were\npresented at the 41st annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical\nOncology (ASCO) held in Orlando, FL, last week.\nSpecifically, the presentation at ASCO described the characteristics of\npatients and their survival outcomes, based on disease Stage at study entry,\nwith most of the presentation being dedicated to describing the outcome of the\n65-patient subset with Stage IIIB locoregional disease. In this subset,\npatients who received L-BLP25 survived considerably longer than those with the\nsame Stage disease who received best supportive care. The difference in\nsurvival between patients who received vaccine and those who did not remains\nstatistically non-significant (p(equal sign)0.0924). Given the relatively\nsmall numbers of patients in each group, this is not surprising. However,\nBiomira and Merck KGaA of Darmstadt, Germany, the collaborator for L-BLP25,\nare more encouraged with the median survival for the vaccine arm. At the time\nof the November 2004 formal analysis, the median survival in the vaccine arm\nwas still not reached, but we know it will not be less than 23 months with a\nhazard ratio of 0.5652. A hazard ratio of less than one indicates a decrease\nin the risk of death. Patients who did not receive vaccine survived a median\n13.3 months. The one-year, two-year and three-year survival differences\ncontinue to suggest a very positive survival impact for those who received the\nvaccine.\nA second poster at ASCO described the patients' quality of life outcomes\nby...