Analysis of a real-world progression variable and related endpoints for patients with five different cancer types

April 18, 2022

Our summary

The identification of cancer progression events (i.e., disease worsening) is important for assessing therapeutic benefit. Measuring cancer progression using real-world data requires methodology that is different from a clinical trial setting.

The authors previously developed a novel method to reliably ascertain real-world cancer progression (rwP) in a cohort of patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer, using data from a deidentified electronic health record (EHR)-derived database. This study aimed to determine whether the same method could identify cancer progression in five additional solid tumor types with a range of disease characteristics: metastatic breast cancer, advanced melanoma, small cell lung cancer, metastatic renal cell carcinoma and advanced gastric/esophageal cancer.

Why this matters

Our prior seminal publications described a feasible and scalable approach to analyze progression-related endpoints from EHR-derived data in solid tumors. That work, however, was focused on a cohort of patients with advanced NSCLC, and left open the issue of applicability to other tumor types. The present article closes that gap, unlocking a path to enable progression-based analyses as part of a wider array of RWE studies, and expanding what observational studies can contribute to oncology research.

Read the research