In the End What Matters Most? A Review of Clinical Endpoints in Advanced Breast Cancer
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many agents are being studied for the treatment of metastatic breast cancer (MBC), yet few studies have demonstrated longer overall survival (OS), the primary measure of clinical benefit in MBC. This paper examines the key endpoints in clinical trials and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approvals of drugs for MBC. PubMed was searched (1980 to October 2009) for reports of phase III trials investigating chemotherapy and/or targeted therapy agents in MBC. FDA approval histories (1996-2009) for cytotoxic and biological agents indicated for MBC were reviewed. Of the 73 phase III MBC trials reviewed, a strikingly small proportion of trials demonstrated a gain in OS duration (12%, n = 9). OS gains were less frequently noted in first-line trials (8%) than in trials of second-line plus other lines of therapy (22%). Few trials were designed with the capacity to detect OS effects. Among 37 phase III trials conducted in the last 15 years, only three systemic therapies were approved for first-line use and nine were approved for use as second-line or other lines of therapy. Of these, only four were supported by results showing longer survival times. There is substantial discordance among the design and conduct of clinical trials, FDA drug approval, and the current view of OS as the ultimate measure of clinical benefit. There is an urgent need to reassess standards for clinical benefit in MBC and to establish guidelines for study design and conduct and drug approval. In the end, what matters most is ensuring rapid access to safe and effective oncology treatments.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.021 | 0.055 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".