Molecular testing to deliver personalized chemotherapy recommendations: risking over and undertreatment - BMC Medicine

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In a Debate article published in BMCMedicine, authors Timothee_MD and VPrasadMDMPH highlight how molecular tests meant to improve adjuvant therapy for cancer could lead to over and under treatment.

]. In other words, when margins are too large, a positive non-inferiority trial result may translate into a clinical detriment. In the DYNAMIC trial, testing the ctDNA approach in stage II colon cancer, the non-inferiority margin was 8.5 percentage points for the analysis of 2-year recurrence-free survival. This margin is large.

]. Large non-inferiority margins may guarantee the success of such trials without ensuring similar efficacy for patients.Solutions to our dilemma of molecular testing should balance a desire to use and embrace new technology with the need to appraise it rigorously in well-done studies.

A second strategy would be to limit de-escalation trials to settings where the current practice benefits have reach a widespread agreement. This would avoid the risk of testing non-inferiority against an ineffective therapy, which guarantees successes but provide no informative data. In the case of DYNAMIC, stage III colon cancer is a better target.

The third solution tackles the issue raised by non-inferiority margins. Test-based decision strategies should not be limited to de-escalation trials and be superiority trials instead. For instance, in stage III colon cancer, among those not receiving chemotherapy based on current management, does ctDNA detect a subgroup that may benefit from adjuvant chemotherapy?Simply because a molecular test is rational does not mean it can improve patient outcomes.

 

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