Modeling survival in childhood cancer studies using two-stage non-mixture cure models

Non-mixture cure models (NMCMs) are derived from a simplified representation of the biological process that takes place after treatment for cancer. These models are intended to represent the time from the end of treatment to the time of first recurrence of cancer in studies when a proportion of those treated are completely cured. However, for many studies overall survival is also of interest. A two-stage NMCM that estimates the overall survival from a combination of two cure models, one from end of treatment to first recurrence and one from first recurrence to death, is proposed. The model is applied to two studies of Ewing’s tumor in young patients. Caution needs to be exercised when extrapolating from cure models fitted to short follow-up times, but these data and associated simulations show how, when follow-up is limited, a two-stage model can give more stable estimates of the cure fraction than a one-stage model applied directly to overall survival.