Re:Woman’s cancer killed by measles virus in trial
by aestra on Thursday May 15, 2014 @07:52AM
(#7748885)
>if they get patients with even worse reaction or even dying from it, it could kill the therapy for good in Phase I.
Perhaps. Or perhaps not. It depends. If it shows to be safer than a bone marrow transplant (insanely dangerous) its got potential.
It's all a benefits/risk analysis.
Re:Woman’s cancer killed by measles virus in trial
by zenbuzzfizz on Thursday May 15, 2014 @12:54PM
(#7750664)
You are thinking of allogeneic bone marrow transplants (bone marrow is transplanted from a donor) where there is a 20% chance of death. Typically, myeloma patients get autologous transplants (the patient self donates bone marrow stem cells) which are much less dangerous (less than 5% death rate). I know someone who has had five ASCTs (autologous stem cell transplants) and he is still kicking. It's not a cake walk but at least you don't die.
Even if they get to Ph3, cancer trials usually take several years to enroll and to reach results, and it wouldn't be a therapy before 6-7 years down the road at the earliest, since you'd want to demonstrate PFS and OS improvement and that takes time in certain forms of Cancer.
EDIT: Patients experiencing complete remission is not completely exceptional in Phase Is. it happens, but it's usually very rare that it occurs in MANY patients. So, effectively speaking, this is n=1 datapoint at this stage, unless demonstrated otherwise.