The study found a slight survival benefit among a small subset of breast cancer patients - women under 50 with early stage estrogen-receptor-negative tumors, which don't respond to risk-lowering drugs like Tamoxifen.
However, these agents only provide clinical benefit to a small subset of patients and are associated with a significant toxicity (Motzer et al, 2000; Yang et al, 2003).
Despite the many molecular-targeted drugs, which either have low cancer cell selectivity or benefits only a small subset of cancer patients, early (before metastasis forms) detection remains the primary advantage for cancer treatment.
Although the small molecule EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors trials for patients with GBM and anaplastic astrocytoma demonstrated low response rates and no benefit in PFS, a small subset of patients had durable responses.
Initial reports with Dysport suggest that the while it is as efficacious and safe as Botox, the primary potential benefit is that a small subset of patients may have a very prolonged effect with normal dosage (eg, greater than 6 months).
Furthermore, novel drugs have been developed to target some of the molecular pathways underlying the carcinogenic processes and maintenance of cancer phenotypes [ 2, 3] yet, these drugs have provided limited survival benefits to only a small subset of patients with cancer, and only a small number of practically useful biomarkers are presently available.
The overall experience in EWS suggests that IGF-1R inhibition with mAb has major activity in this indication, but the benefit was restricted to a small subset of patients.
In our analysis, trastuzumab benefit was confirmed in all but a small subset of TP50 tumors subgroups.
In many clinical trials, the average benefit reported may be concentrated in a small subset of patients, usually those with the greatest risk of developing the study outcome.
Experience with IGF-1R inhibitors indicates that the pathway is a valid target in human cancers, but the clinical benefit seems to be restricted to a small subset of patients.
- However, only a minority of breast and ovarian cancer patients are BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutation carriers, so the benefit of these findings might be confined to a small subset of cases.
