Talk:Tcelna

Latest comment: 11 years ago by DGG in topic Veracity of statement

Has anyone out there had any luck with this vaccine?

Any word on if the phase III trail will happen and if so will it be open label?

Veracity of statement

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"Tovaxin attacks the underlying cause of MS rather than just addressing its symptoms." I don't think that this is technically known to be true. Demyelination is thought to be a symptom of MS, but it is not the cause. The cause would be whatever is causing the body to create the rogue T-cells. Tovaxin does not appear to go after that root, since nobody seems to know what that is, rather it attacks a mode of action of the disease. While the demyelination is the probable cause of many of the symptoms of MS, it is not "the underlying cause of MS." Multiple sclerosis also states that "the cause remains unknown." Even the term "disease modifying therapy" indicates that it is not going after the root of the problem, but rather changing its method of action. I appreciate the attempt to separate this medication from symptom bandages, but can this be rephrased to make this more clear? Thanks! PMonaghan (talk) 02:56, 8 December 2009 (UTC)Reply

Agreed. MS disease-modifying therapies such as the interferons are neither addressed to the root causes nor to the symptoms. This vaccine fundamentally works at about the same level: it seeks to decrease the autoimmune response. The hope is that such vaccines will do it in a more specific way than the interferons.
I also think it important to emphasise the purely investigational status of drugs at this stage of development. it is not a therapy. It is a proposed therapy.
More specifically, the article does not give the actual results of the phase IIb trial. There is thus no way for the reader to even guess at the degree to which it might be effective.. True, not all the necessary material is usually public at this stage. But if papers were presented at a conference, they should be referenced. They are not. This sort of writing about pharmaceuticals under development is very close to puffery. In other contexts, we call this stage of importance Not Yet Notable. I am very tempted indeed to nominate this fordeletion as G11, promotional, but instead I am trying to write the article more realistically. DGG ( talk ) 06:52, 9 August 2012 (UTC)Reply