Medians exaggerated In an oncology trial, whenever you’ve looked at a Kaplan Meier curve of a blinded, independent, central review (BICR) of progression those curves will be exaggerated. More specifically, the median, as estimated by the BICR, will be longer than it should be and longer than it would have been had those same independent reviewers been assessing the patients at the centres. What’s more, the stronger the correlation, between the local(investigator) assessmen

Whilst there are good reasons to believe this might be true, like all good statisticians I’m sceptical until I see some data. If the relationship indeed were different, there would be important implications for trial design and development strategy– I return to this later. Following the recent ESMO conference there are now plenty of published data. Plotted here, and identified by tumour type, are the published hazard ratios (HRs) for randomised trials with nivolumab, pembr