What is the role of in vitro sensitivity assays in second line treatment?
Maurie Markman, MD: Well, my opinions on this are actually quite public. I don’t really think they are of any value. Unfortunately, they indicate that drug A and drug B don’t work, but you don’t want to know that — what you want to know is what drug will work. And none of the assays can tell you that. There is no evidence the assays can tell you what will work any better than what we just discussed. The drug choice should be based on the data that is out there and, of course, the toxicities, and these assays tell you nothing about these issues. It is not of any value for an assay to say a drug might be good, if it causes marrow suppression or neuropathy, and the patient has horrible marrow suppression and horrible neuropathy. To tell you that the disease is resistant to a drug in the second line setting or the third line setting is of no value, since I can tell you that all the drugs have a 95% chance of not working. But, these assays won’t tell you what will work. Outside of the rese
