How many more trials or trial designs does this drug need in order for Teva to instead start pursuing other new treatments or therapies in place of chasing its tail? First, we're supposed to ooh and ahhh over the advanced innovative delayed start trial design model. The delayed start design studied the drug's neuroprotective properties in 2004- then with mixed results as well. The desperate need to find this drug as neuroprotective leaves a bad taste in my mouth; I sense Teva needs to find something fast, a new angle to hold onto this patent. They only have 3 more years; they better start cracking.

Perhaps the inconclusive results reflect that we should also find a better way to track disease progression beyond a rather incomplete, inadequate 'day in the life' type snapshot in the UPDRS scale. I don't know about you but my scores could probably fluctuate quite dramatically on any given day when we factor in stress levels. How can tallying up points on this simplistic tool translate into statistically significant differences or hard science of any sort? Why aren't brain imaging tools also being used? Until we come up with more actual visual or biochemical measures of any differences in disease progression, our research trials remain fundamentally flawed. At this point, I don't feel confident we even have a sound common baseline measure for ensuring that trial participants are at the same disease stage at the onset of the trial.