Systematic capture of the patient perspective can inform the development of new cancer therapies. Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) are commonly included in cancer clinical trials; however, there is heterogeneity in the constructs, measures, and analytic approaches that have been used making these endpoints challenging to interpret. There is renewed effort to identify rigorous methods to obtain high-quality and informative PRO data from cancer clinical trials. In this setting, PROs are used to address specific research objectives, and an important objective that spans the product development life cycle is the assessment of safety and tolerability. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Office of Hematology and Oncology Products (OHOP) has identified symptomatic adverse events (AEs) as a central PRO concept, and a systematic assessment of patient-reported symptomatic AEs can provide data to complement clinician reporting. The National Cancer Institute’s Patient-Reported Outcomes version of the Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events (PRO-CTCAE) is being evaluated by multiple stakeholders, including the FDA, and is considered a promising tool to provide a standard yet flexible method to assess symptomatic AEs from the patient perspective. In this article, we briefly review the FDA OHOP’s perspective on PROs in cancer trials submitted to the FDA and focus on the assessment of symptomatic AEs using PRO-CTCAE. We conclude by discussing further work that must be done to broaden the use of PRO-CTCAE as a method to provide patient-centered data that can complement existing safety and tolerability assessments across cancer clinical trials.
Systematic capture of the patient perspective can inform the development of new cancer therapies. Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) are commonly included in cancer clinical trials; however, there is heterogeneity in the constructs, measures, and analytic approaches that have been used making these endpoints challenging to interpret. There is renewed effort to identify rigorous methods to obtain high-quality and informative PRO data from cancer clinical trials. In this setting, PROs are used to address specific research objectives, and an important objective that spans the product development life cycle is the assessment of safety and tolerability. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Office of Hematology and Oncology Products (OHOP) has identified symptomatic adverse events (AEs) as a central PRO concept, and a systematic assessment of patient-reported symptomatic AEs can provide data to complement clinician reporting. The National Cancer Institute's Patient-Reported Outcomes version of the Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events (PRO-CTCAE) is being evaluated by multiple stakeholders, including the FDA, and is considered a promising tool to provide a standard yet flexible method to assess symptomatic AEs from the patient perspective. In this article, we briefly review the FDA OHOP's perspective on PROs in cancer trials submitted to the FDA and focus on the assessment of symptomatic AEs using PRO-CTCAE. We conclude by discussing further work that must be done to broaden the use of PRO-CTCAE as a method to provide patient-centered data that can complement existing safety and tolerability assessments across cancer clinical trials.
PURPOSE To update the American Society of Clinical Oncology endorsement of the Cancer Care Ontario recommendations on the Role of Patient and Disease Factors in Adjuvant Systemic Therapy Decision Making for Early-Stage, Operable Breast Cancer. METHODS Two phase III trials—the Trial Assigning Individualized Options for Treatment (TAILORx) in women with hormone receptor–positive, node-negative tumors and the Microarray in Node-Negative and 1 to 3 Positive Lymph Node Disease May Avoid Chemotherapy (MINDACT) trial—provided the evidence for this update. UPDATED RECOMMENDATIONS Shared decision making between clinicians and patients is appropriate for adjuvant systemic therapy for breast cancer. For patients older than age 50 years and whose tumors have Onco type DX recurrence scores less than 26, and for patients age 50 years or younger whose tumors have Onco type DX recurrence scores less than 16, there is little to no benefit from chemotherapy. Clinicians may offer endocrine therapy alone for these patients. For patients age 50 years or younger with recurrence scores of 16 to 25, clinicians may offer chemoendocrine therapy. Patients with recurrence scores greater than 30 should be considered candidates for chemoendocrine therapy. Based on informal consensus, the Panel recommends that oncologists may offer chemoendocrine therapy to patients with Onco type DX scores of 26 to 30. The MammaPrint assay could be used to guide decisions on withholding adjuvant systemic chemotherapy in patients with hormone receptor–positive lymph node–negative breast cancer and in select patients with lymph node–positive cancers. In both patients with node-positive and node-negative disease, evidence of clinical utility of the MammaPrint assay was only apparent in those determined to be at high clinical risk; the Panel thus did not recommend use of MammaPrint assay in patients determined to be at low clinical risk. Remaining recommendations from the 2016 ASCO guideline endorsement are unchanged. Additional information is available at www.asco.org/breast-cancer-guidelines .
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