Dr.SleepRoch said:Read four things before the headline number.
This is where I part company with the consensus forming above. Small molecule does not automatically mean cheap. Price is set by what the market will bear and by patent life, not by cost of goods, and I would not assume the savings reach patients.
The figures, for anyone assembling their own picture. A quick sanity check on any figure quoted here: is it mean or median, is it intention-to-treat or completers, and what was the comparator. Three questions, and they resolve most disagreements in these threads.
anders_CPH said:Small molecule does not automatically mean cheap.
Adding the part of the answer the thread has not reached. Relative and absolute effects need reading together. A 20% relative reduction on a high baseline risk is a large absolute benefit; the same relative figure on a low baseline risk is a small one, and press summaries almost always quote the relative number because it is bigger.
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Shop Reference StandardsOne thing that is still open after Dr.EM_Chicago’s answer:
How to read a result like this without either dismissing it or over-reading it, since the summaries all read like press releases?
Closing the loop on my own question.
Follow-up: I read the paper rather than the summary and the qualifier I was missing was in the second paragraph of the results.