The early benefit assessment of drugs in Germany and their preceded market authorization pursue different objectives, resulting in divergent decision-making strategies. This is reflected inter alia by the diverse inclusion of confirmatory endpoints within the assessments of oncological drugs. The pharmaceutical manufacturers are facing the challenge of meeting the requirements for both evaluation processes by the available evidence and avoiding hereby negative early benefit assessments. This is mainly due to the concept of mutually relevant clinical trials.

Identification and gathering of the endpoints is based on a specifically developed guide. The extracted data from the documents of completed assessments up to July 2015 are used to estimate both separately and together the impact of explorative in relation to confirmatory endpoints on the drug approval and early benefit assessment, by contrasting the European Medicines Agency's risk-benefit-ratio and the benefit-harm-balancing of the national Health Technology Assessment (HTA) jurisdiction.

Twenty-one of fourty-one studies’ oncological assessments could be included in the endpoint analysis. From a procedural point of view both the drug approval and the early benefit assessment seem to be not confirmatory since they include explorative endpoints as well. Yet, drug approval is in terms of quality of endpoints more confirmatory than early benefit assessment since it contains a higher proportion of primary endpoints. The latter implies only in 67 percent of the assessments a primary endpoint to be relevant for the benefit-harm-balancing. Moreover, explorative mortality endpoints reached the highest agreement and explorative endpoints capturing health-related quality of life no agreement, referring to the mutual relevance of endpoints for the risk-benefit-ratio and the benefit-harm-balancing.

The missing information transparency of the assessment reports compared to the information offered within the early benefit assessment makes an assignment of endpoints with respect to the mutually relevant clinical trial sometimes troublesome. To warrant, in the long run, a broader confirmatory basis for decisions in health care supported by HTA, a closer inter-institutional cooperation of approval authorities and German HTA jurisdictions seems favorable.