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G. Batist



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    ORAL 12 - Quality of Life and Trials (ID 96)

    • Event: WCLC 2015
    • Type: Oral Session
    • Track: Advocacy
    • Presentations: 1
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      ORAL12.05 - Impact of Time to Drug Approval on Potential Years of Life Lost: The Compelling Need for Improved Trial and Regulatory Efficiency (ID 1547)

      11:28 - 11:39  |  Author(s): G. Batist

      • Abstract
      • Presentation
      • Slides

      Background:
      Survival of incurable cancer patients is improving gradually. Several hundred new therapies are under development. However, internationally, regulatory complexity slows progress by increasing drug development costs (hence, fewer drugs can be assessed with available resources) and by producing numerous speed bumps that delay approval of useful drugs and that increase resources required to document that other agents are ineffective.

      Methods:
      We assessed cancer therapies undergoing phase III trials between 2001 and 2015. To be included, trials had to document statistically significant improvement in overall survival. We excluded adjuvant trials and trials in uncommon malignancies. To determine the number of life-years potentially lost per year required for drug approval, we multiplied the improvement in median survival in years by the estimated number of patients (North American and worldwide) dying annually from the relevant malignancy.

      Results:
      In the Table, we present the life-years lost per year required for approval for 21 therapies in 10 malignancies. When the combined impact of all tumor sites and drugs are considered together, there were 29 life-years lost in North America per hour of delay in therapy approval (1 for every 2 minutes of delay) and 260 life-years lost worldwide per hour of delay (1 for every 14 seconds of delay). These numbers do not take into account impact of drugs non-evaluable due to cross-over or missing survival data, drugs that were prematurely abandoned, drugs still undergoing investigation, or approaches for non-malignant lethal diseases. Figure 1



      Conclusion:
      Clearly, the survival gains associated with the foregoing drugs are only modest. Despite this, there would be a large negative impact associated with approval delays even if factors such as co-morbidities, performance status, ability to pay, etc, limit the number of patients treated to a fraction of the total dying from a specific malignancy. There are numerous opportunities to improve efficiency of cancer drug approval without sacrificing safety or data integrity. This requires urgent attention.

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