However, a treatment that benefits only a subset of patients may still be clinically worthwhile.
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.
This inconsistency raises the possibilities that there are different subsets of MET/HGF-aberrant breast cancer with different responses to MET/HGF-targeted therapies and that MET inhibitors benefit only a particular subgroup of patients.
However, the spectrum access benefits are only a subset of the potential benefits of CR and the new opportunities it provides to both improve performance and to reduce the implementation cost of wireless devices.
Results from current ancillary benefits studies may be underestimates due to unquantified benefits, as only a subset of the health consequences from air pollution have adequate exposure-response relationships [ 59, 135- 137].
For example, antibodies targeted to the EGF-receptor provide benefits only for a subset of colon carcinoma with K-ras mutations [ 1].
Prediction accuracy of doubled haploid lines included in the training set was much greater than of those excluded from the training set, so there was little benefit to phenotyping only a subset of the lines genotyped.
However, this benefit was observed in only a subset of patients who were sero-negative for ganglioside antibodies before trial entry [ 7].
New trial approaches are urgently needed especially for the development of targeted cancer therapies that will only benefit a subset of patients.
In trials of the VEGF neutralising antibody bevacizumab in metastatic breast, colorectal and lung cancer, only a subset of patients benefit from the combined use of bevacizumab with chemotherapy and the survival benefit afforded is measured only in terms of months or is not significant compared to chemotherapy alone [ 23, 35, 43, 51].
Despite the encouraging clinical efficacy delivered by targeted agents, these monotherapies benefit only small subsets of patients with oncogene-driven tumors and, further, virtually all develop resistance and succumb to relapsed diseases [ 11].
