In the future, researchers may need to account for other factors that have recently been discovered to affect prognosis–such as statin use, duration of the first off-treatment interval, and circulating tumor cells, Dr. Longo said.
He also noted that the high cost of sipuleucel-T therapy may curtail its use.
“The manufacturer has set the cost of a 1-month course of sipuleucel-T at $93,000, or $23,000 per month of survival advantage,” he noted.
DAN L. LONGO, M.D., a deputy editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, is an internist and oncologist at the National Institutes of Health's Biomedical Research Center, Baltimore. These comments are taken from his editorial accompanying Dr. Kantoff's article (N. Engl. J. Med. 2010;363:479-81).