I’m biting my tongue figuratively at the crassness and ignorance of “What difference does a doubling of survival percentage make” comment.
Did you go through caring for a loved one through the literal life and death battle to even achieve life extension under the death sentence of an aggressive terminal cancer situation?
I watched my mom tough out 4 years of a 3 years or less of life remaining prognosis, trying several drugs before the side effects and fear that the remaining drug choices might subject her to miserable QoL and sudden death due to resulting severe side effects. I influenced her to not try the remaining treatments in favor of having several more months without debilitating side effects until the unchecked cancer ended her life.
The first treatment she was given was the immunotherapy Tecentriq, which is given as an infusion. It had something like a 15-20% response rate, and for a lucky 9% perhaps a complete response (for urethelial carcinoma). Within the 15-20% you had various durations of shrinking or not progressing the tumors.
For the 6-9 months she was on Tecentriq she had no notable side effects and actually felt better than without treatment.
This period of treatment without side effects, just having to get her to the hospital for the infusions and regular bloodwork and imaging was wonderful and we prayed it would continue to work, but alas the tumors returned to progression.
The next drugs, the first being an anti vgef treatment if I remember similarly helped for a while and then stopped, and the next drug targeting another genetic target of the tumor had the same outcome after stretches at different dosages.
The pills had successively worse and multiple debilitating side effects, but at least my mom’s bloodwork remained good for the most part. The remaining possible drugs all had worse safety and blood count/infection/sudden death type profiles, and although I still second guess my ultimate recommendation to stop treatments, my mom had suffered progressively worse with the pills, having to temporarily stop to recover enough to resume taking the pills.
I’ve taken the time to go through this detail to try to emphasize that a treatment with an excellent safety profile with no significant side effects that extends life by any amount, is already a winner of an option and a wonderful thing for the patients and their families. Add a significant OS benefit and a chance to effectively be one of the lucky ones that are cured asa practical matter, and that’s a far better option for GBM and other terrible cancers!
What was particularly troubling in your post is the notion that 11% 5 year survival vs 5% is no big deal. It is a tremendous deal. And if you make it past 5 years with DCVax your odds of surviving much longer increase significantly.
Finally, staying alive longer with good QoL also gives a chance for further breakthroughs to become available, like the more promising combo DCVax-PD1 treatments or other new treatments.
That’s it my rant is over, but think again before making such a statement please.
