Welcome to Plenary Session.

I'm your host, Dr. Vinay Prasad.

I'm a practicing hematologist, oncologist, and I'm associate professor of medicine.

I'm interested in issues at the intersection of medicine, oncology, and health policy, and that's what you're going to get on this podcast.

Welcome to Season 2.

Today you're in for a special treat. This is a bonus episode. This is a lecture I gave to the

meta-researchers of Metrics. It's entitled Cancer Meta-Research 101, and it's geared at a broad

and wide audience, and you won't want to miss this.

And this lecture is a bonus episode, and slides are available to Patreon backers.

So if you like this podcast, if you like Plenary Session, and you don't support us on patreon.com,

should rethink that decision.

On that positive note, we'll turn to the lecture, Cancer Meta Research 101, for a broad

audience, so hope you enjoy.

So what I want to talk to you about today, there's this thing in oncology that if you spend a lot of time studying cancer drugs, you're going to hear a lot, and it's called progression-free survival.

And I want to explain to you what that is, what that means, and is it something that's meaningful to patients, or is it something that's simply measurable that's really easy to ascertain?

I'm going to talk a little bit about crossover, which is a unique phenomenon that's present

more in cancer clinical trials. There's some examples of crossover in the psychiatry literature,

but in cancer it's a unique beast. It's a certain type of crossover. And I wonder if it has led

us to underestimate good drugs or has it perhaps the opposite

actually led us to misestimate bad drugs and think of them as good?

And then I'll show you some sort of broad empirical work that looks at the lay of the land

of all of cancer drug space.

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