Survive and advance

With the availability of immunotherapies that have greatly extended survival in certain cancers, industry, academics and regulators are thinking ahead about how to evaluate the next generation of immuno-oncology therapies without requiring enormous and very long trials.

"The problem is if you have a high plateau, a very strong effect of the existing therapy, then any new therapy that wants to improve on that will have to show either a massive effect or will have to run a very long trial to show a smaller difference," said Axel Hoos, SVP, therapy area head of oncology R&D and head of immuno-oncology at GlaxoSmithKline plc...