The 2018 SNO presentation gives you a very clear picture of nearly all the first 3 years, with the exception of about 5 patients on the cusp of crossing 3 years, and several lost to follow up (LTFU). If I recall the numbers correctly, and admittedly I may be off a little here or there as it is the direction and approximate magnitude that matters here, but 3 year rates go from 3/2017 data at 25.4% and 9 or 10/2018 data at 28.2%. So he is clearly not talking about the study data for the entire population.
The increase of survival can be attributed to two very important things. First, the removal of placebo from the final 32 patients who all receieved DCVax(R)-L (you see what happens there now that it is branded). This makes the final 108 enriched with treatment, but it doesn’t stop there. Likely, when the decision to remove placebo from consideration for newly enrolled patients was made, this also meant that any patient who was currently being treated with placebo (i.e, had not yet progressed) also flipped over the Registered Trademarked DCVax-L. Thus the only placebos in that cohort are rapid progressors who die quickly. (Uh oh…what do we do now that the treatment group has delayed treatment or the placebo group has forced migration?…Uh oh, placebo was just enriched with death in the PP analysis). This makes the last 108 probably somewhere near 90% treated, essentially.
Bare in mind that the first 223 jumped almost 3% when @ 96 more are added (108 - 5 short of 3 and - 7 LTFU) giving you the first clue to treatment effect. The floor for the treatments group in the original OS analysis is about 25.4% + 1.5(3%) or 30%. There is fudge factor up and down for simplicity.
Now where things get real interesting is with the predictive statistics provide in the JTM article and the SNO presentation. Here, you see that the long fat tail flattens out substantially and when one factors in that enriched DCvax(Registered Trademarked)-L (aka BRANDED) cohort, one would expect that the BRANDED Product Cohort lifts these predictive lines upward rather significantly and those patients who are put on the Branded Product called DCVax-L which is a Personalized Immune Therapy to treat Brain tumors and has shown long tail survival through stimulating a person’s own immune dendritic cells into overcoming tumor micro environment and fighting antigens from their personal tumor LIVE LONGER LIVES (or so I am told through branded and unbranded product advertisements).
