BETA - What is overall response rate?

What is overall response rate? We are often curious when they get started on new treatments, what is their response to treatment? And response in myeloma is sort of, you know, we define it in multiple ways. We define it based on the reduction of their M protein or their light chains if it's more than 50 percent, it's called a partial response. If it's more than 90 percent response, it's called a very good partial response. Or if it's complete reduction and elimination of the M spike in the blood in the urine, and then it's called a complete response. So, and then, you know, in clinical trials, when we're assessing a drug's efficacy or how well it has done, we use this term called overall response rate. So it takes all the patients in that treatment arm and assesses, basically combines them. And whether it's VGPR, very good partial response, partial response, or CR, the culmination of all of that is overall response rate. The overall response rate. So when we do, what is the overall response rate? When we test a particular agent or combinations of drugs in a group of patients with myeloma in a newly diagnosed setting, the relapse setting, we, you know, determine how efficacious is this combination, this drug, and we follow patients and determine are they responding to therapies, the myeloma regressing. And so we do have some criteria. They're called the International Myeloma Working Group criteria. And for instance, if we have a 50 percent reduction of the myeloma at time of diagnosis, so before we start, the particular combination is called a partial response. And then if we have more than 90, well, at least 90 percent reduction is called a very good partial response, and then we have, you know, the stable disease MR, which is minimal response, less than 25 percent, and then we have the complete remission. And with time, we're becoming more and more, what can I say, more, the response is criteria revolving, right? I remember when I started to treat patients with myeloma, we were very content with the 90 percent reduction, the very good partial response, and complete remission was zero. And there was no near complete remission, the stringent complete remission, and when we don't detect the myeloma in the blood, in the bone marrow, if we do imaging study, we don't see new lesions. But now we also use the minimal residual disease test, where we go more in depth. And the minimal residual disease can be performed in two ways, two methods. We're using a flow assessment, a flow analysis, when the pathology analyze, for instance, a million cells and determine, you know, with eight to ten colors analysis, if there are residual malignant plasma cells, or using the genome, the next generation sequence of the tumor from time of diagnosis, and if we see copies of that particular. So the overall response, and just go back to your original question, is, for example, if I have a 70 percent overall response, it means that 70 percent of the patients that I'm studying experience an objective response. The overall response rate is the percentage of patients who have a partial response or better to a therapy. It's a direct measure of a drug's ability to kill tumors and is often used to evaluate new cancer therapies in clinical trials.