open access
A standardised, generic, validated approach to stratify the magnitude of clinical benefit that can be anticipated from anti-cancer therapies: the European Society for Medical Oncology Magnitude of Clinical Benefit Scale (ESMO-MCBS)
..... To date, there is no standard tool for grading the magnitude of clinical benefit of cancer therapies [25, 26], which may range from trivial (median PFS advantage of only a few weeks) to substantial (improved long-term survival). Indeed, in the absence of a standardised approach for grading, the magnitude of clinical benefit, conclusions and recommendations derived from studies are often hotly disputed [25] and very modest incremental advances have often been presented, discussed and promoted as major advances or ‘breakthroughs’ [5, 25–29]. Overestimating or overstating the benefits from new intervention can cause harm: it confounds public policy decision making [29], undermines the credibility of oncology research reporting [26, 29, 30], harms patients who choose to undertake treatments based on
exaggerated expectations that may subject them to either risk of adverse effects, inconvenience or substantial personal costs [26, 28] and, in the public domain, they fuel sometimes inappropriate hype or disproportionate expectations about novel treatments [31, 32] and the need to allocate public or personal funds to provide them....
Table 7.
Field testing ESMO-MCBS v1.0: ovarian cancer
