Study Questions Dead-End Cancer Clini...(et for years he and his colleagues had n...),Health

In their study, the Canadian researchers reviewed the post-presentation histories of 200 phase II trials with "encouraging results" for breast, lung, gastrointestinal, genitourinary, and gynecological cancers. One hundred of the trials were presented at ASCO's 1995 and 1996 annual meetings, while the other 100 were presented at the society's 2006 conference.

They found that just 13 percent of the trials did, in fact, go on to a phase III study, despite results that had shown a positive response of the therapy against the targeted tumor.

Many of the trials reached a dead end, because the researchers couldn't get financial backing or enough patients for a phase III look at the treatment.

However, the study also found that "many of these limitations are known [to the researchers] when planning the phase II study, implying that many phase II trials are not planned as precursors of phase III trials."

So, why the wasted time, money, and effort for research that the investigators suspect will go nowhere? Tannock believes that, in many cases, the researchers' career goals may have come first.

"There's a lot of young oncologists out there, and they are encouraged to publish," he explained. "Their promotion at academic centers is dependent on publication. So, many of them may be encouraged to put together a protocol in which they take new drugs and treat a small number of patients with a certain disease in a phase II trial."

Because the teams that conduct phase II trials are smaller, a young researcher is more likely to be listed as the prestigious "lead researcher." This gains researchers more recognition than if their name is buried among the much-longer list of authors that typically accompanies phase III studi
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