Treatment Efficacy Score-continuous residual cancer burden-based metric to compare neoadjuvant chemotherapy efficacy between randomized trial arms in breast cancer trials.

Background: Difference in pathologic complete response (pCR) rate after neoadjuvant chemotherapy does not capture the impact of treatment on downstaging of residual cancer in the experimental arm. We developed a method to compare the entire distribution of residual cancer burden (RCB) values between clinical trial arms to better quantify the differences in cytotoxic efficacy of treatments.

Patients And Methods: The Treatment Efficacy Score (TES) reflects the area between the weighted cumulative distribution functions of RCB values from two trial arms.