Yannick Buccella, Gastrointestinal and Molecular Oncologist at City Hospital Zurich, shared on X:
“Beating a placebo in oncology is easy. Beating the competition is dangerous.
We are talking about KRAS once again, this time in advanced lung cancer with its specific subform of G12C.
You might assume new cancer drugs always get tested against the best available treatment. They don’t. They’re tested against placebo, or an older standard, or chemotherapy. Beat that, and you will get approved. Nobody requires you to prove you’re better than your newest rival, and trying that is pure risk.
Win, and you might gain market share. Lose, and your drug, which you poured a lot of money into for its development, is finished. So it leaves a strange gap: several approved drugs for the same disease, no data on which is best, because there is no head to head comparison. Which leaves us oncologists at times choosing on habit and instinct.
On Sunday at the ESMO meeting, that gap closes for one group. KRAS G12C mutations exist in a share of lung cancers, with two drugs already approved for it. A third one called divarasib now made the bold move to run run directly against both, in a proper phase 3 trial.
The company already reported patients went longer without the cancer growing, and lived longer. We will have the numbers on Sunday, stay tuned for those. Head-to-head trials are my favorite trials, this is how we learn. Without them medicine accumulates ambiguous options instead of clear answers. We should ask for them far more often.”
This also can be interesting:
From $24 Million to $400 Million: Why Merck Paid Up for the Same Founder’s Next KRAS G12D Drug
