Commentary on King-Kallimanis et al.: Inadequate measurement of symptomatic adverse events in immunotherapy registration trials

Symptomatic adverse events are common with cancer therapies, and provide key information about tolerability during development and regulatory review. After a therapy becomes available on the market, information about these adverse events is essential for patient and clinician decision-making. Historically, the standard approach for collecting symptomatic adverse events in trials depended on clinician reporting via the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events (CTCAE)—but this process was found to be unreliable and to miss about half of patients’ symptoms