Risk and Benefit for Basket Trials in Oncology: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Oncology research is increasingly adopting new clinical trial models that implement the concept of precision medicine. One of these is the basket clinical trial design. Basket clinical trials allow new treatments to be evaluated across multiple tumor types. Patients recruited to basket clinical trials share certain molecular characteristics of their cancer that are predictive of clinical benefit from the experimental treatment.

Our aim was to describe the risks and benefits of basket clinical trials in oncology.

Our study was prospectively registered in PROSPERO (CRD42023406401). We systematically searched PubMed, Embase, and ClinicalTrials.gov for reports of basket clinical trials in oncology published between 1 January, 2001, and 14 June, 2023. We measured the risk by treatment-related adverse events (grades 3, 4, and 5), and the benefit by objective response rate. We also extracted and analyzed data on progression-free survival and overall survival. When possible, data were meta-analyzed.

We included 126 arms of 75 basket clinical trials accounting for 7659 patients. The pooled objective response rate was 18.0% (95% confidence interval [CI] 14.8–21.1). The rate of treatment-related death was 0.7% (95% CI 0.4–1.0), while 30.4% (95% CI 24.2–36.7) of patients experienced grade 3/4 drug-related toxicity. The median progression-free survival was 3.1 months (95% CI 2.6–3.9), and the median overall survival was 8.9 months (95% CI 6.7–10.2).

Our results provide an empirical basis for communicating about the risks and benefits of basket clinical trials and for refining new models of clinical trials applied in precision medicine.