How do you gauge success in cancer treatment?

A standard way to see how well a cancer therapy works is to measure, usually in months, how long someone lives without the cancer getting worse. That’s called “progression-free survival” in the dry parlance of this sort of analysis. But that doesn’t necessarily match — or even capture — quality of life, STAT’s Ed Silverman reports.

A study published in JAMA Internal Medicine challenges progression-free survival as a surrogate endpoint, a metric the FDA sometimes relies on to speed drug approval.

“The troubling fact is that we do not have strong enough evidence to show that some of these drugs can extend a patient’s life or improve their quality of life,” said Feng Xie, a study co-author and a professor at McMaster University.

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