Sponsored by
This is another type of analysis of the latest Optune trial for newly diagnosed GBM. Unlike most results that are published, this is for an evaluation of the health economics where they use a mathematical model to predict how long patients will live in each arm of the trial if they were observed over the course of 15 years instead of about the 5 years covered by the trial. This reports the average survivals, not the median survivals that were already presented. The main difference is the median survival is the point at which the person at the midpoint of the trial dies. For example, if there were 500 patients, it is the point at which patient number 250 dies. This allows them to report the information in a reasonable amount of time, but it doesn't give any insight into the long tail - patients who live for a long time.
The average adds up all of the survival times and divides by the number of patients. This is impossible to do when patients live for a long time, so this study is using a model to estimate it. This takes into account the long term survivors.
There are a few amazing numbers presented here. IF you survive the first 2 years on Optune, you will have about a 17% chance of living to 15 years. In the temodar group, that number is 8.7%. The average life expectancy for the Optune group was 4.2 years vs. the control arm of temodar alone at 2.4 years. An increase of 1.8 years!