How Multiple Entities Exaggerate the Effectiveness of Cancer Treatments

Executive Summary

• Statements about the effectiveness of new cancer treatments usually are quite exaggerated.
• This covers statistical analysis of this exaggeration.

Introduction

It is very common for those aligned with the oncology area to use superlatives to provide an exaggerated framing of the benefits of new treatments. Furthermore, the exaggerations of treatment effectiveness come from multiple sources.

The Use of Exaggerating Superlatives?

The following quotes are from the book Malignant.

In 2015, I attended the annual cancer meeting in Chicago. Like most meetings, this was drizzled in superlatives. I heard all the terms already mentioned, as well as groundbreaking, lifesaver, marvel, and home run. Matt Abola and I decided to formally study superlatives. We made a list of 10 superlatives and searched news.google.com to identify when they were used to describe a cancer drug. Matt quickly had a stack of 94 articles that used superlatives.

The use of superlatives came from a broad collection of news outlets—66 by our count. Among those 94 articles, 97 superlatives were used, referring to 36 specific drugs. Our research questions were simple: who was using superlatives and what drugs were they praising?

Issue #1: No FDA Approval?

Our results were published in JAMA Oncology. We found that half of the drugs (18 of 36) that received superlative mentions had not received FDA approval.

How can a drug be promoted with such language if it is not yet approved for use? However, it is common to do so.

Issue #2: Drugs Never Given to Humans?

More concerning, we found that 14% (5 of 36) had never been given to a human being. These drugs had only been given to mice or tested on cancer cells in a petri dish. Any cancer researcher knows that the odds of a drug that works on mice or in a test tube also helping a human being are low—perhaps as low as winning the lottery. To celebrate these drugs in the lay media seemed irresponsible.

Issue #3: The Use of Promotional Language For Treatments With Low Historical Effectiveness?

Five percent of superlative use was for describing a therapeutic cancer vaccine. Therapeutic cancer vaccines have had high rates of failure among all cancer therapies. There has only been one ever approved by the FDA, and there are a number of concerns regarding its approval.

If a treatment category has no history of success, then the promotional language for such a category should be moderated to account for this history. I have found many articles on how effective cancer vaccines will be — however, there is little evidence that a virus causes cancer in the first place. This is an attempt by virologists and companies specializing in virology to enter the cancer space. Here is a good example of the exaggerated claims of viruses causing cancer from the prestigious MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is spread through infected semen, vaginal fluids, blood and breast milk. While it does not cause cancer directly, researchers believe it increases the risk of cancer by damaging the immune system, which reduces the body’s defenses against other oncoviruses. It can enable other oncoviruses to cause cancer.