Slow and steady wins the race: Practical (and philosophical) considerations of treatment activity evaluation when novel anticancer agents just slow neoplastic progression

摘要

The question of how to measure antitumor treatment activity in the era of molecularly targeted agents is anything but trivial. This is especially so in diseases like kidney cancer, where, because of the availability of a number of active agents that are often used sequentially, progression-free survival (PFS) has replaced overall survival (OS)-once,the holy grail of oncology-as the most reasonable, although not ideal, primary end point of clinical trials [1].