Hyped Melanoma Drug Trial Proves Only That Big Pharma Will Do Anything to Sell Its Poisons

In yet another display of Big Pharma’s mastery at creating hype for its drugs, a new trial is thrilling oncologists and Big Media. Fully funded by the companies hoping to profit, Bristol-Myers Squibb and its new acquisition, Medarex, the study purports to show that ipilimumab effectively treats the aggressive skin cancer, melanoma.

Bristol-Myers has been trying to find a cancer that its drug, ipilimumab—which will cheekily be called ippy from here—can treat. They appear to have given up on the idea of cure. However, their presentation at the 46^th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology convinced many of the doctors attending that it’s the best thing since…well, since selling the public on the idea that they have something to offer in cancer treatment.

As has been documented here, ippy has been tried as a cancer treatment many times without success. Attempts to affect early stage cancers have met with dismal results, so the latest approach has been to go for the gold (literally) and see if they can cobble together some sort of study that seems to indicate some sort of benefit in advanced cancer patients. The result is now being obediently hyped in mainstream media.

The Ippy Trial

The trial was reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. It was a Phase 3 study of melanoma patients whose cancer could not be treated surgically. They had previously been treated with other methods, but their cancers had metastatsized.

The drug trial did not compare ippy with a placebo, though they did try to give that impression by using placebos in addition to drugs, but never alone. Instead, they chose to compare ippy with an unproven and unapproved drug called gp100.

Potential subjects were eliminated if they suffered from diarrhea or any other condition the trial designers decided were indicative of any immune system disorders. [One must wonder how anyone with a diagnosis of cancer could have qualified! —Ed.]

Melanoma sufferers whose cancer had metastasized to the central nervous system were eliminated. Since 40-60% of all melanoma patients have brain metastases, this means that about half the potential advanced melanoma patients were not considered candidates for ippy. So, whatever the benefits shown by the trial, we can halve them to better correlate with reality.

A total of 676 melanoma patients were enrolled. Drugs were given to patients in a ratio of approximately 3:1:1. That is, about three times as many were given ipilimumab plus gp100 as either ippy alone or gp100 alone:

By the end of 55 months, all the patients had died. Neither ippy nor gp100 saved any lives. At the end of two years, the results didn’t look much better. At 12 months, 63% of all the patients had died. At the end of two years, 86% of the patients were dead.