NorthWest Biotherapeutics Inc (NWBO)

[Johnni]

How nice to collect and publish all the critiques, some of them even valid. Addressing one specific point that’s already been exhaustively discussed:

Progression-free survival was always a stupid endpoint. All any patient has ever cared about is overall survival. Duh.

I remember looking at my husband’s radiologist and trying, amid the shock of a brain cancer diagnosis, to take in an explanation that the time to cancer recurrence generally has little bearing on overall survival. My first thought was, then why are you discussing time to recurrence at all? All my husband and I cared about was survival.*

It might be true that longer PFS can correlate with better quality of life within a limited OS timeframe, but that’s a red herring. The PFS metric was invented by cheating drug developers who failed to meet OS endpoints.

So to disingenuously flip the script back again and say an unmet PFS point is in any way significant in light of a wonderful breakthrough success in OS? That is ludicrous. Cruelly ludicrous!



*(And he is indeed still with us, more than a decade later. His cancer was “only”Grade III, and his surgeon was the talented, skilled Jon Weingart of Johns Hopkins.)