At Cytel we believe that expert statistical input has the power to shape the future of clinical development: de-risking portfolios, accelerating timelines, and increasing the probability of success.

In this blog we talk to Adam who lives in North Carolina United States to find out more about his career path, achievements, current role at Cytel and his interests outside of work.

Topics: Recruitment, Cytel Strategic Consulting, Regulation, Statistical Programming, Statistical Analysis, Adaptive Clinical Trials, biostatistics, adaptive designs, careers, clinical trials, CRO, clinical research

 

Immunotherapy has brought us many promises, most notably, of a future where humans are able to harness their body’s own ability to protect them from illness. Immuno-oncology (IO) may be the ultimate frontier of that future reality, with a promise of being able to help our bodies deflect or cure us of any malignancies. Today, these therapies include cell therapies, cancer vaccine, and...

Topics: Oncology, biostatistics, immunotherapy

 

The biopharmaceutical and healthcare industries now collect more data than ever before due to advances in the variety of information sources combined with the ability to store vast quantities of diverse data. Sophisticated machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques allow us to accessand analyze any combination of a multitude of data sources. The way that traditional...

Topics: biostatistics, real world evidence, data science

 

On August 29th 2018, the FDA announced (1) that it would be establishing a Complex Innovative Trial Design (CID) Pilot Meeting Program. This follows the release earlier in August of a draft guidance (2) to help advance effective and innovative clinical trial designs early in drug development that can expedite new cancer therapies.

Topics: Oncology, FDA, adaptive sample size re-estimation, biostatistics, adaptive trials, Seamless designs

 

EnForeSys is Cytel’s tool for patient recruitment planning. We have discussed on the blog recently with Tufts University's Center for the Study of Drug Development, Ken Getz, the problem the industry continues to face with patient recruitment, and the fact that most trials significantly exceed their original planned duration. In the face of this problem there's a pressing need to create more...

Topics: patient enrollment, enforesys, clinical trials

 

JSM 2018, ASA’s annual gathering of over 6500 attendees attracted statisticians and data scientists to the beautiful city of Vancouver on July 28 – August 2. The conference offers a one of a kind opportunity for statisticians to exchange ideas and explore opportunities for collaboration. In this blog, we will provide access to our team's slide decks from the event, as well as some of their...

Topics: biostatistics, adaptive designs, Bayesian, careers, data science

Topics: Recruitment, Trial Quality, Cytel Strategic Consulting, Regulation, Statistical Programming, Statistical Analysis, Adaptive Clinical Trials, biostatistics, adaptive designs, careers, clinical trials, CRO, clinical research

 After having spent 15 years in the pharmaceutical industry, in May of 2018, I decided to explore new horizons and took the lead of the newly created Basel statistical programming team at Cytel. Building a new team in an exciting environment and being part of a successful story was the challenge I was looking for. In this blog, I will share my perspectives on what a sponsor programmer might...

Topics: Statistical Programming, careers, clinical research

 

Cytel’s 7th East User Group Meeting (EUGM) will take place on November 14 & 15, 2018 at Merck in Darmstadt, Germany, bringing together industry experts, thought leaders and applied statisticians to discuss the future of clinical trials.

The agenda has been developed collaboratively by the EUGM Scientific Committee, and keynote speakers will include Stephen Senn, Meinhard Kieser, Thomas...

Topics: East, Bayesian Methods, Trial Design, Program and Portfolio Optimization, Adaptive Clinical Trials, phase 2, Simulations, adaptive designs

We have written on the blog in the past about the value that a statistical consultant can bring to your team, and to the overall clinical development process. Statistical consultants can be instrumental to the success of your development program, providing a variety of input from creating innovative trial designs that improve information quality and efficiency, to supporting regulatory...

Topics: Cytel Strategic Consulting, pharmacometrics, model-informed-drug-development, quantitative decision-making

By Gordhan Bagri and Munshi Imran Hossain with  H A S Shri Kishore

Shiny (from RStudio) is one of the most popular R packages. The package allows programmers to create applications with interactive user interfaces. These applications can then be deployed for non-programmers to perform analysis. Non-programmers can, therefore, make use of the statistical capabilities of R by means of point and...

Topics: Cytel Strategic Consulting, Statistical Analysis, R programming, data science, R language

In this blog, we share a new infographic based on this popular blog post illustrating some of the critical interactions that need to take place between data management and statistics groups to help ensure efficiency and data quality. 

Topics: Data Management, Clinical Research Services, Statistical Analysis, Clinical Data, EDC, database build, data manager, big data, clinical trials

At Cytel our strategic consulting team works on a wide range of projects including: Identifying the best clinical trial design, implementing adaptive designs, developing a regulatory strategy and interacting with regulators.

In this blog we talk to Sam who lives in the Boston area, to find out more about his career path, current role at Cytel, industry experience and his interests outside of...

Topics: Recruitment, Cytel Strategic Consulting, Statistical Programming, Statistical Analysis, Adaptive Clinical Trials, biostatistics, adaptive designs, careers, clinical trials, CRO, clinical research

A recent article published by Cytel authors Samadhan Ghubade, Sharayu Paranjpe, Kushagra Gupta, Anil Gore and colleague Krishna Asvalayan in the journal Current Science, tackles the topic of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) – a matter of great concern in drug research. The authors focused their research on drugs which had been either banned or withdrawn due to a serious problem of ADRs and...

Topics: Cytel Strategic Consulting, Statistical Analysis, data science, pharmacovigilance, signal detection

In this blog we share a case study of how we established and ramped up a functional service outsourcing partnership for biostatistics, programming and data management.

Topics: Statistical Programming, outsourcing, SAS

 

 It’s shaping up to be a busy year for Cytel’s software development team with a number of upgrades and planned launches across our range of tools. (Watch this space for announcements soon on new quantitative decision-making software OK GO and an upgrade to EnForeSys). East, our industry leading platform for clinical trial design, simulation, and monitoring will be unveiling version 6.5 in...

Topics: East, Trial Design, Program and Portfolio Optimization, Adaptive Clinical Trials, phase 2, Simulations

A number of the Cytel team were in Amsterdam, 3rd- 6th June 2018 for the PSI Conference. This year’s conference was held at the magnificent Beurs Van Berlage, a venue full of history and interesting architectural features. We took the opportunity to give delegates a first look at OK GO, our new clinical trial Go/No-Go decision-making software in this magnificent setting.

In this blog, we'll...

Topics: Clinical Data, Adaptive Clinical Trials, biostatistics, adaptive designs, Bayesian, PSI Conference, estimands, data science

 

By Esha Senchaudhuri

With thanks also to Jitendarreddy Seelam and Ramanatha Saralaya for their input.

The fact of the matter is that I now want to recall everything, every trifle, every little detail. I still want to collect my thoughts and - I can't, and now there are these little details, these little details...” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Meek One

Old Fyodor was hardly talking about...

Topics: Early Phase Trials, Clinical Development Strategy, pharmacology, clinical trials

 

At the recent PCMG conference in Malta, Adrian Otte ( Independent Consultant, formerly VP Global Development Operations at Amgen) presented to delegates the strategic choices open to sponsors when  choosing an outsourcing model and the three fundamental issues in play: standardization, flexibility and cost. In Dr. Otte's view, standardization of systems and processes is key, but is often...

Topics: Clinical Research Services, outsourcing, Clinical Development Strategy, clinical trials

In this blog, Paul Fardy, Executive Director of Data Management at Cytel shares his thoughts on how the data manager role has evolved. 

Topics: big data, Biometrics, real world evidence, clinical data management, clinical trials