OnCo
termsTerm

Crossover in trials

aka cross-over, crossover-adjusted, crossover adjustment, adjusted for crossover, permitted crossover, crossover was permitted, crossover rate, post-progression therapy, subsequent therapy, subsequent treatment, RPSFT, rank-preserving structural failure time, IPCW, treatment switching, unplanned crossover, confounded by crossover

When patients in a trial's control arm are allowed to switch to the experimental drug after their cancer progresses. It is fair to patients but blurs the survival comparison, because the control group has now had the drug too.

Crossover is common in trials of drugs already approved elsewhere or clearly active (imatinib in GIST, osimertinib in FLAURA, 177Lu-PSMA in VISION and PSMAfore, where 84% of controls crossed over) and explains why many trials show large progression-free survival gains but little or no overall survival difference. Statistical corrections (rank-preserving structural failure time, inverse probability of censoring weighting) estimate what survival would have been without crossover but rely on assumptions and are treated cautiously by regulators, who may still demand an OS trend. In regulatory debates, crossover cuts both ways: it can hide a true survival benefit or excuse its absence.

Category
Trials & regulation

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