So, I'm a professional medical writer/editor and the first thing that strikes me is how poorly written and edited is this commentary by the famous Roger Stupp. Admittedly the headline is strong: "2022 Top Story in Oncology," but he likely didn't write the headline. Moreover, that headline makes a promise to the reader that the story itself comes nowhere near to delivering.
What, exactly, makes this the top story in oncology for 2022?
I can think of several things, but very few are even mentioned in this commentary.
1) Extraordinary mechanism of action of murcidencel
2) Extraordinary progress against a famously recalcitrant (and horrible) tumor type after hundreds of prior failures
3) Extraordinarily benign safety profile (totally ignored in this commentary)
4) Extraordinary promise (admittedly in the early stages) of this treatment when combined with other modalities especially PD-1 checkpoint inhibitors
You (my fellow iHub readers) can probably think of other extraordinary story angles that I'm missing.
To be fair, there is one extraordinary aspect of this story that he did properly focus on: the use of an external control arm to demonstrate efficacy in a phase 3 trial in glioblastoma. But even then, the position he takes is so wishy-washy. He ends up in the final paragraph saying that there are both pros and cons to using external control arms, which I'm sure is true, but is that really what makes this the top oncology story for 2022? He missed so much else.
He gets bogged down in details right from the beginning. For example, in the lead paragraph he gives detailed progression-free survival (PFS) data, but we know that PFS is notoriously unreliable in this context (using intracranial imaging to gauge response to an immunotherapeutic agent). To his credit he does mention this difficulty in the next paragraph, but then why did he give it so much emphasis in the previous paragraph?
This commentary reads to me like a first draft he dashed off in a rush without taking the time to revise it, and without the benefit of an editor. Yet the story is labeled under "Editor's Picks" on the Practice Update website.
Sigh. This is why they pay medical editors the big bucks -- to prevent embarrassing disasters like this. Maybe the people who run the Practice Update website are having trouble hiring professional, skilled editors who are up to the task of working with an eminent authority like Professor Stupp on a story like this. Or perhaps they were in a rush to publish first. Or perhaps the good professor refused to let anyone else touch his precious prose. Whatever the answer, he did himself no favors by allowing this not-ready-for-prime time article to reach the eyes of the reading public. (IMHO)
-- OJ
Market Data 
Markets 
