Meaning of "the benchmark for median survival"

Question

From the Background section of a clinical trial poster:

Good performance, unresectable stage III non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients should receive standard-of-care treatment, i.e. Concurrent chemoradiotherapy (cCRT) followed by durvalumab. cCRT has been shown to improve survival outcomes among good performance status inoperable stage III non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients in well controlled randomized trials compared to sequential CRT (sCRT) and single-modality therapy. The benchmark for median survival with cCRT is 29 months in clinical trials. However, many "real world" patients do not receive cCRT. Less is known about the survival benefits of cCRT vs other treatment modalities in pragmatic, non-clinical trial settings. Moreover, the reasons for poorer survival with cCRT in the "real world" setting needs to be investigated.

What is the meaning of the benchmark for median survival? Does it mean "typical survival shown by this kind of therapy in clinical trials?

Or is there really some benchmark and all trials are expected to show a survival of at least 29 months with this treatment?

Answer 1

Does it mean "typical survival shown by this kind of therapy in clinical trials?"

Yes. They are saying that this is a typical median survival in trials of this treatment, but that real-world survival is lower. Therefore, there is a gap between real practice and the trials. Furthermore, that makes it unclear if the trials showing a benefit translate to real world benefits. I would presume that if this is in an abstract/introduction, they are saying this to motivate their own study, which I am guessing is then going to be a real world assessment of different treatments which the authors feel has better practical validity.