1993: 5 of a total of 7 (72%) patients achieved total eradication of their cancer (R/R AML), page-30

You will always have real difficulty getting a new treatment into a frontline trial where the patient’s life is at risk. This is actually a huge issue for many new anti-cancer drugs in that while they often work well at an early stage, they are not very effective in the late-stage patients they are first tested in. More than one very promising anti-cancer drug has fallen foul of this hurdle of the years.

Yes the historical data RAC has for Bisantrene is like gold these days. There are so many trials recruiting in AML that it is getting very hard to get enough R/R AML patients to show a new drug is safe. I just checked and there are now 558 clinical trials now trying to recruit (up from 538 in Oct). Many of the new AML drugs in early clinical development will just never make it to market, not because they don’t work, but because recruiting the patients required to gain approval will take too long.