clinical-trials
18 stories tagged "clinical-trials"
MD Anderson Made the Case for Radiation Cleanup After Immunotherapy. Then Its Own Trial Undercut It.
In the oligometastatic subgroup the strategy was built for, small and underpowered, the patients who added radiation trended the wrong way: median survival of 42 months against 75.8 for the drugs alone.
CancerSummit's $500 Million Lung Drug Split the Curve Patients Can't Feel
Ivonescimab delayed tumor progression by 2.4 months in EGFR-mutated lung cancer, but its overall-survival curve never cleared statistical significance and serious treatment-related adverse events nearly doubled.
CancerTwenty People, No Control Arm, and a Startup on the Side: Reading the Pancreatic Cancer Vaccine's Fine Print
Ninety percent of twenty volunteers made KRAS-specific T cells. None was shown to avoid cancer. Two of the investigators co-founded the company that licensed the shot from Johns Hopkins, which stands to collect royalties.
Drugs & FDAChina Runs More Drug Trials Than America. The FDA Says It Can No Longer Trust Data From Sites It Can't Inspect.
China went from under 8 percent of the world's drug trials in 2010 to passing the United States by 2020. After three deaths in Chinese studies surfaced late, the FDA says it has sometimes been denied access to the very sites whose data underpins American approvals.
CancerThe Cancer Trials That Buried Vitamin C Never Put It in a Vein
Mayo's famous trials gave advanced cancer patients vitamin C by mouth and found nothing. A randomized trial that delivered it by IV, at a dose pills cannot reach, doubled survival in metastatic pancreatic cancer.
InvestigationsBuilt to Find Nothing: Merck Tested Gardasil's Safety Against Its Own Aluminum Adjuvant
In ten of eleven pivotal trials, Merck's Gardasil 'placebo' was 225 micrograms of the same aluminum adjuvant that is in the vaccine, and serious harms counted only inside a 14-day window.
CancerA Week Instead of a Month: The Faster Prostate Radiation Was Only "As Safe" on the Coarser Ruler
PACE-C put five-fraction radiation against the four-week course in 1,208 men. On the old grading scale they matched. On the finer one the short course logged 17 percent bowel toxicity against 10 percent, and the trial still can't say whether the shorter beam controls cancer as well.
CancerThe Evolutionary Fix for Drug Resistance Works Best on a Tumor Too Small to Find
City St George's mathematicians say hitting a tumor at its weakest moment can drive it extinct. Their own model clears 95 percent only below 7 million cells, far smaller than any tumor a scan can find.
Infectious DiseaseDavid Ho's Lab Built an Antibody to Neutralize Nearly Every Strain of HIV. Its First Test in People With the Virus Held for Two Weeks.
Fifty-four volunteers, nine with HIV, and just three with virus still in their blood. The engineered antibody drove their viral load down as much as ninetyfold, then lost the ground within a week as it drained away.
InvestigationsNEJM Retracted the Study That Approved Amgen's Vasculitis Drug. It Had Never Done That in 200 Years.
The FDA says the drug's superiority result came from re-scoring nine patients after the trial was unblinded. It is still on U.S. shelves while Amgen fights the withdrawal.
CancerNo Gene Editing, No Catheter Into the Skull: A Pediatric Brain-Cancer T-Cell Trial Reported One Complete Response in 33 Young Patients
Children with diffuse pontine glioma rarely live past a year. A first-in-human trial infused 33 young patients with pediatric brain tumors, including DIPG, with T cells trained on three tumor proteins, no genetic engineering, and reported one complete response and three survivors still alive years l
CancerTwenty Years of Nothing on Brain Cancer, and the Best New Lead Is a Vitamin Nobody Can Patent
A University of Calgary trial added high-dose niacin to standard glioblastoma treatment and reported 82% of 24 patients progression-free at six months. The design is single-arm and early, but the molecule is a cheap, unpatentable vitamin.
InvestigationsThe Knee Procedure That Barely Beats a Convincing Fake
A university press release pitches a minimally invasive knee procedure as a way to delay joint replacement, but the only sham-controlled trials show the fake version works nearly as well.
CancerIvermectin and Cancer: The Review the Horse-Paste Crowd Wasn't Supposed to Get
A 2025 systematic review finds coherent anticancer biology in ivermectin across ten tumor types. The human evidence to match it does not exist. The question of why is what the punchline was designed to bury.
Infectious DiseaseThe cheaper staph antibiotic just won the biggest trial ever run
The largest randomized trial ever run for staph bloodstream infection finds the cheap generic antibiotic cefazolin works as well as the older standard, with less kidney damage and no pharma money behind the answer.
Infectious DiseaseThe AI Vaccine That 'Passed' Its First Trial Three Years Ago
Cambridge finished the Phase 1 trial in 2023. The press tour arrived in 2026. The paper, when you read it, said the immunogenicity was modest.
CancerALTAIR Missed Its Primary Endpoint. The Press Tour Found Something Else.
A phase 3 trial testing chemotherapy in ctDNA-positive colorectal cancer patients missed its primary endpoint at p=0.107, and a post-hoc reanalysis is doing the public-facing work.
CancerPancreatic cancer's undruggable wall just cracked. The follow-up is 8.5 months and the money was already placed.
Revolution Medicines' daraxonrasib nearly doubled median overall survival versus chemotherapy in previously treated metastatic pancreatic cancer at ASCO 2026, with 8.5 months of follow-up and a two-billion-dollar Royalty Pharma deal already riding on what comes next.