A Proposal for Progression-Free Survival Assessment in Patients with Early Progressive Cancer.

Background/aim: Progression-free survival (PFS), which is evaluated in oncology clinical trials, is determined based on tumor progression evaluated according to an assessment schedule. There is possibly a bias in median PFS and hazard ratio (HR) for PFS depending on the assessment schedule referring to randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer.

Materials And Methods: We re-analyzed the PFS in the FTD/TPI phase 2 trial by changing the assessment schedule. To assess biases in median PFS and HR for PFS resulting from different assessment schedules, we performed a computational simulation.

Results: The reanalysis of FTD/TPI phase 2 trial and the simulation results showed that there were biases in median PFS and HR for PFS.

Conclusion: In RCTs for early progressive cancer, median PFS is dependent on the assessment schedule; however, HR for PFS can be assessed without clinically-meaningful differences between assessment schedules, regardless of biomarker assumptions.