Researchers from King’s College, London, and the London School of Economics have shown that only 11 out of 68 cancer drugs on the market for 5 years had any ‘Clinically Meaningful Benefit’.
In a damning report published in the British Journal of Medicine (3 October 2017), the researchers concluded that the drugs simply did not show the benefits they were supposed to show when regulators first approved them. In particular, there was rarely an increase in overall survival time.
Chris Woollams, former Oxford University Biochemist and founder of CANCERactive said, “Two factors contribute to the deceit. Firstly, the Pharmaceutical companies tend to pick younger, healthier subjects for the trial. This factor has been evidenced particularly in the USA where almost identical failure rates were noted. Secondly, the drug companies use ‘surrogate end points’. These are actually meaningless to real patients in the real world.
Instead of looking to see if patients in the Clinical Trial actually live longer, clinical trials may use tumour size, time before progression or simply effects in blood tests. None of this does much for the cancer patient. Cancer patients want to know if they are going to live longer – in fact survival to them means exactly that. It is a measurement of cancer defeat. Current game playing by Big Pharma is just a huge waste of money”.
It has been a bad 12 months for orthodox medicine after Oxford University research showed that orthodox medicine did not extend Prostate cancer survival one jot; and then a recent study showed that many drugs actually caused a cancer to spread. “If that is the case, maybe the drugs are knocking back the cancer, while worsening the situation and thus no survival benefit is found. Clearly, there’s a need for a rethink. An enormous rethink,” Woollams added.