text_1: Avastin Largely Safe for Patients With Type of Advanced Lung Cancer
text_2: This is a story reporting on a study which reported on the potential harms associated with the addition of the drug Avastin in patients with an advanced form of a specific type of lung cancer. What the study showed and was reported in this story was that there were several individuals who experienced bleeding complications with Avastin added to their treatment. The piece fails to indicate what benefit patients might hope to expect from the addition of this drug to their other treatment regimens. Although the story was clear about the potential harms associated with this drug, it seems a little odd not to more fully explain that it is not yet known whether the drug will be helpful to patients with metastatic non-squamous cell non-small cell lung cancer – especially since the FDA announced this week that this drug does not demonstrate benefit when used to treat breast cancer. In the absence of information about the benefits, it is not possible to weigh the risk of harm against the potential for benefit. This is an issue that should have been addressed in this story. The timing of this story is curious but probably coincidental – to a degree. The big news about the drug Avastin is that the FDA has decided not to approve it for use in treating breast cancer because it does not improve survival or delay disease progression. While this did receive one line in the story, instead of hyping the potential for use of this particular in lung cancer, the space might have better used to examine what are the expectations for a drug used to treat a metastatic cancer. Drugs need to be not only safe, but also affective in order to add value to a treatment regimen. So while we know the story was based on a journal article released this week, it is the editorial decision to report on this rather mixed bag finding that is curious. And while we applaud news coverage of Phase 4 trials, are all Phase 4 trials (or the relative paucity of same?) going to be reported consistently?