RE:RE:RE:RE:Patients 20 & 21
I have crunched the numbers many times and there are always that don't work. They don't present it clearly.
Regarding the 20 patients. For the total 41, 19 are pending. Leaving 22 that are done done. If you remove the 3 1b patients that is 19. So not enough phase 2 patients to make a table of 20.
My belief is that they are counting the 1b patients in the 20. The wording about "completed all the evaluations" is very suggestive to me that they removed the patient that passed away when making that particular table. That would leave them with 21 patients. Not sure why they did 20 instead of 21.
When I make a table on that assumption, my takeaways are
- the 90 d CR is good.
- we don't lose too many patients by 180 d
- 270 day is deceptive as they GAINED a CR from one of the retreated patients. But
lost one of the others
- 360, went from 8 to 5 so lost 3 which is interesting as shows that not really in the clear till get to 360 day out and then you are cured (IMO).
All of this still works out to Keytruda exceeding success but shows that there is complexity in how the patients respond. Ever since phase 1b when 2 of the 3 0.7 dose patients were one and done, I thought it was a superstar treatment. I suspect that there are more factors such as depth of tumour, location etc that will come to be understood as important.
Still a big believer in the science but suspect that there will be more to learn in the future about which patients are likely to be like the one and done vs the stubborn NR's. Over time.