
A golden age for oncology
I've often considered what would be a realistic effect to power an overall survival (OS) trial on. So I thought I’d go look in a few labels to see what’s been observed and then I thought why don’t I go look at all the labels in the last 20 years, like you do! As a by product this confirmed we’re in the middle of what looks to be a golden age for oncology – the number of drugs that have a labelled OS HR ≤0.75 in the last 5 years is more than the previous 15 years put togeth

Golden age in oncology - methodology
All approved oncology drugs here in advanced cancer indications were identified from here with labels accessed in December 2016. A drug was counted a maximum of once per tumour type from US labels and only if it was both less than the relevant HR threshold and statistically significant. In some cases the upper confidence limit for the HR was < 1 but the label indicated that the effect was not statistically significant. This occurred in cases where interim analyses were pre