A Rebuttal To The Bear Thesis On Corbus Pharma From Cantor Fitzgerald

An article on TheStreet.com reiterated a bear thesis for Corbus Pharmaceuticals Holdings Inc CRBP, while quoting a source saying the phase II clinical trial data of resunab were “nowhere near as robust or convincing as the company claimed them to be.”

Cantor Fitzgerald’s Elemer Piros pointed out, however, that the article failed to place the data “into appropriate context.”

Busting The Fallacy

“Confusing a Phase 2a trial with a regulatory study is a common fallacy,” Piros commented. He mentioned that the goal of this trial is to “establish safety and investigate an efficacy signal,” rather than to be used as “the basis of a drug approval.”

Corbus’s resunab met the goal “with flying colors,” achieving “compelling and unprecedented treatment effect in scleroderma patients,” despite the study being small and relatively brief.

“When effect size is unknown and it is being tested with a novel instrument (CRISS), one cannot power a trial to achieve statistical significance. Yet, Resunab achieved statistical significance. When the distribution of the data is unpredictable, an a priori statistical method may not be relevant and an alternative may have to be employed to analyze the data with rigor. Corbus did use the appropriate statistical method for data with binomial distribution,” the analyst noted.

Piros reiterated a Buy rating on the company, with a price target of $17.

At last check, Corbus shares were down 2.82 percent at $8.60.