Lorus announces results of Virulizin(R) Phase III Clinical Trial
Not going to comment on the trial results per se, but I thought this was a good opportunity to point out what I suspect most readers of this page already know: press releases that contain quotes by non-employees are always written by the company. For the uninitiated, this will seem counter-intuitive. After all, the quotes are literally that, set aside by quotation marks and all. But as every PR expert will tell you, it is far too risky to allow someone outside the firm to initiate a quote. The drug firm might have limited control over the results it presents, but it has full control over the quotes that appear in its press release announcing the results. So, the company initiates the quote and then asks the non-employee to endorse it, sometimes allowing for minor edits. If the non-employee insists on major changes that the company can’t live with, the company always has the option of excluding the quote. Legally, the non-employee is bound by confidentiality to avoid comment if this occurs.
I was moved to write this when I read the Lorus release, not because it contained an inordinate number of outside quotes, but because the quotes chosen for publication came across as particularly heavy-handed to me. Here’s the one from the CRO doc leading the study: “Performing such analyses [exploratory subgroup analyses] to define the specific population that benefits from modern oncologic therapies has become standard operating procedure in contemporary cancer drug development and is one more necessary step that will bring us closer to defining the proper role of Virulizin(R) in the management of this disease.” Who actually speaks like that? I’d suggest to Lorus that they invest a bit more in their PR rep.
For investors, this is just another opportunity to remind ourselves of the need to be highly skeptical of company pronouncements.
It’s important to read them carefully, but your gaze should be fixed squarely between the lines.
