{"doi":"10.1101/2021.05.14.442837","title":"Cancer patient survival can be accurately parameterized, revealing time-dependent therapeutic effects and doubling the precision of small trials","abstract":"SUMMARY Individual participant data (IPD) from completed oncology clinical trials are a valuable but rarely available source of information. A lack of minable survival distributions has made it difficult to identify factors determining the success and failure of clinical trials and improve trial design. We imputed survival IPD from ∼500 arms of phase III oncology trials (representing ∼220,000 events) and found that they are well fit by a two-parameter Weibull distribution. This makes it possible to use parametric statistics to substantially increase trial precision with small patient cohorts typical of phase I or II trials. For example, a 50-person trial parameterized using Weibull distributions is as precise as a 90-person trial evaluated using traditional statistics. Mining IPD also showed that frequent violations of the proportional hazards assumption, particularly in trials of immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs), arise from time-dependent therapeutic effects and hazard ratios. Thus, the duration of ICI trials has an underappreciated impact on the likelihood of their success.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2021,"id":224179,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":0.0,"corpus_rank":10439,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":true,"is_dataset_confidence":0.7245,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":243916,"name":"Geoffrey Fell","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":7893,"name":"Brian M. Alexander","orcid":"0000-0003-3903-9175","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":264590,"name":"Adam C. Palmer","orcid":"0000-0001-5028-7028","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":24147,"name":"Peter K. Sorger","orcid":"0000-0002-3364-1838","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":17978,"name":"Deborah Plana","orcid":"0000-0002-4218-1693","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":79,"raw_metadata":{"citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:54:18.470602Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}