MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4408613005 · doi:10.1177/20542704251325314

Therapeutic value of oncology products with a conditional approval from Health Canada: a cross-sectional study

2025· article· en· W4408613005 on OpenAlex
Joel Lexchin

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.

Bibliographic record

VenueJRSM Open · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEconomics, Econometrics and Finance
TopicHealth Systems, Economic Evaluations, Quality of Life
Canadian institutionsYork UniversityUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMedicineValue (mathematics)OncologyCross-sectional studyInternal medicineFamily medicineEnvironmental healthStatisticsMathematicsPathology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Objectives: Investigate the additional therapeutic value compared to existing medicines of new oncology drugs given a conditional approval (Notice of Compliance with conditions, NOC/c) by Health Canada using therapeutic ratings from four independent organisations. Design: A list of all new oncology drugs with an NOC/c from the start of the programme in 1998 to the end of 2023 was constructed. First-in-class and orphan drug status was determined for all drugs. Therapeutic ratings were obtained from the Canadian Patented Medicine Prices Review Board, the French drug bulletin Prescrire International, the French agency Haute Autorité de Santé and the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care. If more than one organisation rated the drug, the highest rating was used. Setting: Canada. Participants: Oncology drugs with a conditional approval. Main outcome measures: Additional therapeutic gain compared to existing products. Results: Fifty-four oncology drugs were approved. Conditions were fulfilled for 29, fulfilment was still pending for 22 and 3 drugs were either discontinued by the manufacturer or placed on restricted access. Eighteen drugs had both orphan drug and first-in-class status. Therapeutic evaluations were available for 50 drugs, and the distribution of additional therapeutic value was examined for the entire group of 50 drugs, for 29 drugs that had fulfilled their conditions and for 18 drugs with both orphan drug and first-in-class status. In the three groups, 8.0%, 10.3% and 11.7%, respectively, offered major therapeutic improvement. Conclusions: Few new oncology drugs approved through the NOC/c pathway offer major therapeutic improvements over existing drugs.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.008
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.317
Threshold uncertainty score0.998

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0080.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.360
GPT teacher head0.490
Teacher spread0.130 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it