David Fabrizio Says Surrogate Endpoints Will Help Accelerate Drug Discovery

Surrogate endpoints, or endpoints other than overall survival, will help accelerate drug discovery and provide additional solutions for patients, according to David Fabrizio, of Foundation Medicine, Inc. However, alternate endpoints are not without their drawbacks, like the challenge of identifying pseudoprogression.

Transcript (slightly modified)

There have been discussions on replacing the traditional endpoints in cancer clinical trials. What will be the benefit of having alternate endpoints?

What it can do, certainly, is accelerate the speed of drug discovery and provide additional answers and additional solutions, more efficacious drugs in the end. So, I do think there is this need for surrogate endpoints, things beyond overall survival, and we have seen these utilized.

I think there are challenges associated with that as well, especially in immunotherapies, if we look at response, for instance, or PFS [progression-free survival], there can be difficulties in understanding whether a tumor is actually shrinking or growing versus something like pseudoprogression, which may just be a representation of the activity of the drug, the infiltration of lymphocytes around the tumor, for instance.

So I think we need to explore surrogate endpoints, additional endpoints beyond overall survival, and I think that that will definitely accelerate drug discovery.