Time to next treatment as a meaningful endpoint for trials of primary cutaneous lymphoma

Abstract

Time to next treatment (TTNT) is an emerging endpoint in clinical studies of primary cutaneous T-cell lymphomas (CTCL), with utility as a surrogate marker for the “duration of clinical benefit”. TTNT provides a highly clinically meaningful endpoint that uniquely reflects not only the duration of treatment efficacy on disease and symptom control, but also incorporates the patient experience by accounting for patient compliance and tolerance to the studied therapy(s). Given the distinct challenges of pin-pointing the exact date of progression in patients with multi-compartmental CTCL, TTNT overcomes many of the shortcomings of conventional, disease-focused, clinical endpoints in primary CTCL research. Although widely accepted in clinical research for numerous other incurable malignancies, TTNT currently lacks a standardised definition. In this paper, we describe the value of TTNT as a clinical endpoint, review the applications of TTNT in primary CTCL research, and propose a standardised definition of TTNT to be applied in future clinical research of primary CTCL therapies.