SRX OS vs PFS, page-4

6186mark,

" A drug that confers only PFS but not OS (for example, the outcome determined from the SIRFLOX study) does not extend patient life, but may improve the quality of life, or make the patient’s condition more manageable."

He has indeed muddled it up... the SIRFLOX study did not report on OS (and it'll be some time before they'll have data on that metric). And the SIRFLOX study only conferred a PFS advantage on liver tumours; when the dataset was extended to all tumours across the body, the PFS difference between control and treatment was random. So he is explicitly wrong in stating that the SIRFLOX study confers only PFS benefit, he is wrong in stating that the SIRFLOX does not provide OS benefit (it hasn't been determined), and he is wrong in stating that PFS provides a qualitative measure. So 3 crosses in ONE SENTENCE puts the article in garbage territory.

In essence, the SIRFLOX study showed that there was (1) no PFS advantage to using SIR-spheres; (2) when a subset of the PFS data pertaining to liver tumours, then there was a PFS advantage (ie. liver tumours remained in a "stable" state for a longer period of time); (3) that OS results were not ready; and (4) IMO... a significant negative PFS effect pertaining to non-liver tumours from using SIR-spheres.