Bear, With regard to your What's Next post yesterday and the cognition substudy I was to lazy to find any of my past posts(I don't know how you do that so easily) so I will go from memory.

In the US there is about 5.6 million people with Alzheimer's. That number is growing at about 20% per year. Of that number of people about 65% of them have vascular dementia. At last years AGM DM was careful to stress vascular dementia. The numbers of patients in Canada is very close to 10% of the experience in the US which makes sense as our population is about 10% of that in the US and both countries have this babyboom demagrapgic issue. From the information I have been able to find on the net there is about 15 million people in the other G8 countries with Alzheimer's so I have assumed that those people would have the same basic breakdown of about 65% with vascular dementia.

With some rounding there is about 13 million people that may benefit from ABL if the substudy data shows a benefit to this group. At this time there are no drugs that I am aware of to combat this large and fast growing problem. Many patients in this catagory depend on thier government to support them in this state. I have estimated that the annual cost of supporting these patients would be about $75,000 per year per patient that was confirmed to be pretty accurate by SanFrancisco99. Putting this together the cost to society in the G8 countries is pretty close to 1 trillion dollars for each year that these patients are institutionalized. If ABL can delay the time that this segment of patients may have to be institutionalized the savings to society and the taxpayers in each country is hugh. The incentive for governments to have access to a drug to help them reduce this massive cost is very incouraging to me if ABL has that ability.

So what is a drug worth that may be able to delay that annual cost to government, insurance companies and the families of these patients worth. Taking the low end of what was on past corporate presentations of $2,000 per year per patient, the potential annual market is $26 billion dollars in the G8 countries in theory. In reality the potential market is way higher than that as I would think many people, including myself would want to be proactive and start an ABL regimen for a few years in advance of it being necessary.

The single biggest benefit to RVX is that at this time there is no competition at all for at least a few years. What is a reasonable valuation for a drug that has potential annual sales of $26 billion? My guess is that it is well in excess of $10 billion.

If it is the cognitive function substudy portion of the trial that had success, it is worth following up on so that RVX or its successor can have a deliverable drug that both Don McCaffrey and Dr. Wong referred to in yesterdays Web Cast. It is defenately a worthy target to pursue.

All IMO, dyodd.

tada