Magical Biomarkers For Outpatient LRTI Again
Literally a paid advertorial.
Every once in awhile, a paywalled medical journal will publish an open-access article. Then, you have to make an important determination: charitable gesture by the journal, explicit use of research funds, or paid advertorial.
In this for-profit world of medical publishing, it is rarely the former. Occasionally, it will be written into funding proposals to allow for open-access knowledge dissemination. But, most frequently, it’s the advertorial.
Today’s advertorial is from MeMed BV, in which the enablers of diagnostic test trials are collaborating to pump their point-of-care “is it viral or is it bacterial?” test. This is just one of many out in the world, and includes the usual suspects such as procalcitonin and C-reactive protein – the latter of which is part of the MeMed BV’s bespoke biomarker panel. The MeMed BV platform adds TRAIL and IP-10 to CRP, and is FDA-approved as substantially equivalent to PCT.
To “prove” their product reduces antibiotic prescribing, the MeMed team and their consultants are conducting the JUPITER trial. Here, we see the publication of the JUNO pilot, a scoping trial reportedly to determine the base rates of antibiotic prescribing to inform sample size for the subsequent trial.
There wouldn’t really be any point to publishing this, of course, other than to drop $3,900 to boost awareness of their product and produce charts like this:
Wow! Look how much better MeMed BV appears! Yet, when all is said and done – the absolute differences in prescribing comes down to a grand total of 6 patients. None of these secondary, exploratory outcomes constitute reliable differences.
Many trials have looked at whether point-of-care biomarkers move the needle on antibiotic prescribing, with mixed (and biased) results. There is insufficient evidence to claim a difference between the diagnostic accuracy of this platform and its predecessors – but the authors are beholden to their funders to give this platform its day in the sun.