Identification of novel agents that improve the survival of patients with high-risk MM. xy plot of percent OS for the 2 arms of randomized controlled clinical trials for patients with different genetic lesions. Data from Table 4 for MM patients with t(4;14) (circles), del17p (triangles), unfavorable FISH (squares) treated with thalidomide (red) or bortezomib (green) based regimens. The x-value is the survival for the arm with the novel agent, and the y-value for the survival of the control arm. The regimens with data points above the dotted line are better than control, whereas those below are worse. In this analysis, regimens that improve survival have points that fall in the upper left, whereas those that worsen survival fall in the lower left. One sees clearly that all of the bortezomib arms (red) fall in the upper left, whether bortezomib is being used in induction or maintenance and whether it is being compared with placebo, vincristine-adriamycin, or thalidomide. In contrast, the thalidomide arms (green) almost all fall in the lower right, whether thalidomide is being used for induction or maintenance and whether it is being compared with placebo, melphalan, or bortezomib. Abbreviations are as in Figure 2.