Marco Donia: Does participation in Cancer Clinical Trials improve survival outcomes on its own?

Marco Donia, made the following post on LinkedIn:

“Does participation in Cancer Clinical Trials improve survival outcomes on its own?

• (JAMA, 20 May 2024)
• Commentary here.

Bold conclusion: After accounting for biases and confounders, cancer clinical trial participation was not associated with longer survival.

These results challenge the common belief that being enrolled in a trial leads “per se” to better outcomes.

Across all studies, participation in a clinical trial was associated with a lower mortality risk; however outcome differences disappeared after adjusting for confounders.
What drives this difference? Something we have found in several cancer types: patients enrolled in clinical trials are different from those in routine practice
(for differences observed in melanoma: see here.)

Source: Marco Donia/LinkedIn
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Marco Donia is a Clinician-Scientist and Junior Research Group Leader (TIL group) at the Department of Oncology and Center for Cancer Immune Therapy, University of Copenhagen Herlev Hospital, Denmark. He serves as an Associate Professor in Clinical Oncology at the University of Copenhagen. Donia is also a clinical oncologist treating patients with cancer immunotherapy. His research group is currently investigating new immune-regulatory circuits in PD-1/PD-L1 resistant tumors.