How to recognize at an early stage whether a new cancer therapy prolongs life
Wednesday, May 11, 2011 - 09:30
in Health & Medicine
Great hopes are always placed in new cancer therapies. However, whether new surgical techniques, drugs or radiation therapies actually prolong the life of cancer patients, or even cure them, can often only be reliably assessed after several years' of testing. Researchers are therefore looking for proxy markers ("surrogate endpoints") that after initiation of cancer therapy can reliably predict as quickly as possible whether the treatment has a benefit.