Some anti-cancer treatments (e. g., immunotherapies) determine, on the long term, a durable survival in a small percentage of treated patients; in graphical terms, long-term survivors typically give rise to a plateau in the right tail of the survival curve. In analysing these datasets, medians are unable to recognize the presence of this plateau. To account for long-term survivors, both value-frameworks of ASCO and ESMO have incorporated
post-hoc
corrections that upgrade the framework scores when a survival plateau is present. However, the empiric nature of these
post-hoc
corrections is self-evident. To capture the presence of a survival plateau by quantitative methods, two approaches have thus far been proposed: the milestone method and the area-under-the-curve (AUC) method. The first approach identifies a long-term time-point in the follow-up (“milestone”) at which survival percentages are extracted. The second approach, which is based on the measurement of AUC of survival curves, essentially is the rearrangement of previous methods determining mean lifetime survival; similarly to the milestone method, the application of AUC can be “restricted” to a pre-specified time-point of the follow-up. This Mini-Review examines the literature published on this topic. The main characteristics of these two methods are highlighted along with their advantages and disadvantages. The conclusion is that both the milestone method and the AUC method are able to capture the presence of a survival plateau.
In metastatic triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), the efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) in combination with chemotherapy has been demonstrated in randomized clinical trials (RCTs). Despite this, an indirect comparison is not yet available. Reconstruction of individual patient data from Kaplan-Meier curves allows the indirect comparison of different treatments. We analyzed six overall survival (OS) curves from three RCTs. In patients with ≥1% positivity, atezolizumab was found to determine a significantly better OS than pembrolizumab. As regards pembrolizumab, adopting a threshold of PD-L1 positivity ≥10% (as opposed to ≥1%) improved median survival to a remarkable extent (23.0 vs 15.5 months).
The study demonstrated that the neurological patient, especially if elderly, has a high risk of DDI and ADRs and that many of these can be avoided by case discussion in multidisciplinary team meetings, in which the presence of a dedicated clinical pharmacist is crucial.
The workshop and thus this study would have benefited from a larger variety of stakeholders. Therefore, the conclusions arising from the workshop are not the opinion of a representative sample of HTA professionals. Nonetheless, organizations and speakers were carefully selected to provide a valuable approach to this theme. Thus, these proceedings highlight some of the gaps and needs in the education and training programs offered worldwide and calls for further investigation.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.