Copeman’s Textbook of the Rheumatic Diseases
E M Paice · Postgraduate Medical Journal · 1987
Abstract Background Drug combinations are the standard of care in cancer treatment. Identifying effective cancer drug combinations has become more challenging because of the increasing number of drugs. However, a substantial number of cancer drugs stumble at Phase III clinical trials despite exhibiting favourable efficacy in the earlier Phase. Methods We analysed recent Phase II cancer trials comprising 2,165 response rates to uncover trends in cancer therapies and used a null model of non-interacting agents to infer synergistic and antagonistic drug combinations. We compared our latest efficacy dataset with a previous dataset to assess the progress of cancer therapy. Results We demonstrate that targeted therapies should be used in combination with cytotoxic drugs to reach high response rates. We identify 4 synergistic and 10 antagonistic combinations based on the observed and expected response rates. We also demonstrate that recent targeted agents have not significantly increased the response rates. Conclusions We conclude either we are not making progress or response rate measured by tumour shrinkage is not a reliable surrogate endpoint for the targeted agents.