Cytel Blog

In a recent interview with Cytel, Zoran Antonijevic, longstanding chair and leader of the DIA Adaptive Design Scientific Working Group, spoke about adaptive design methods. He gave us insights on how these methods can help achieve new levels of clinical trial efficiency and probability of success.

Cytel is conducting a webinar series that introduces biostatisticians to some of the more commonly used complex innovative trial designs. On May 20, 2020, Zoran Antonijevic joined us as a speaker at a webinar from this series, “Innovative Drug Development at a Glance - The Concepts, The Vision, & The Factors to Consider”. In the webinar, Zoran defines complex innovative trial designs, summarizes the potential benefits of each, and highlights key factors to consider when applying these techniques. Continue reading this blog for a summary of the webinar. Click the button to get free access to the webinar slides and recording.

At the close of May 2020, we have about 500 new trials globally but trends in trial design and choice of therapies tested have largely remained the same. The state of Vaccine Trials though has changed in both number and trial design.

On May 7, Cytel and Certara conducted a virtual panel discussion on new opportunities and implications for the future of drug development in emerging economies. The speakers included highly acclaimed key opinion leaders and industry experts who spoke about new sources of research funding being channeled towards emerging economies and the need to understand its strategic priorities to properly assess future opportunities for growth.

Our first panelist, James Orbinski is a professor at York University's Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research. James is an experienced medical doctor, a humanitarian practitioner, a best-selling author and a leading scholar in global health. After extensive field experience with Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Dr. Orbinski was elected MSF’s international president from 1998 to 2001. He launched its Access to Essential Medicines Campaign in 1999, and in that same year accepted the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to MSF. Our moderator from Cytel, Principal Scientist, Edward Mills began the virtual panel discussion by asking James a series of pertinent questions on the issues around the current pandemic. Continue reading this post for the Q&A.

Get access to the virtual panel replay by clicking on the button below.

In this blog, we speak with Christopher Jennison, Professor of Statistics at the University of Bath, UK. Professor Jennison provides us insights on group sequential methods, the origin of their implementation and the value they have been adding over the years.

Cytel is hosting a new webinar series that introduces clinical fellows, early career biostatisticians, and others interested in clinical research, to some of the more commonly used complex innovative trial designs. In our previous blog, we spoke with Zoran Antonijevic about adaptive design methods.

Join us for a complimentary webinar on June 3, 2020 where Professor Jennison is going to introduce us to the basics of group sequential designs and sample size re-estimation. Learn how to use these methods and understand how they can improve trial design.

The Cytel Trial Tracker now features summary plots that display trials by country, trial status and study design. This enables us to take a deeper dive into patterns of trial design in COVID-19 studies. This blog post explores the use of single-arm studies, numbers of multiarm studies, and more.

In this blog, we speak with Zoran Antonijevic, longstanding chair and leader of the DIA Adaptive Design Scientific Working Group, and former Principal Statistical Consultant at Cytel. We speak about adaptive design methods, their value to the industry, their success and ways to overcome the existing challenges including the hesitation towards its wide adoption.

This summer Cytel is hosting a new webinar series that introduces clinical fellows, early career biostatisticians, and others interested in clinical research, to some of the more commonly used complex innovative trial designs. These webinars will cover the benefits of each design, and the practical considerations for adoption.

On May 20, 2020 Zoran Antonijevic is going to present an introductory overview of all these advanced design methods, in a webinar from this series. This webinar will define complex innovative trial design, briefly introduce the concepts, summarize the potential benefits of each, and highlight key factors to consider when applying these techniques. You can register by clicking on the button below.

This has been an exciting week for COVID-19 studies. We learned that several Cytel clients who have designed new clinical trials using our East software, are about to begin enrolling. Our subject-matter experts are also heavily involved in designing vaccine trials, as well as offering biometrical support and data management for three vaccine trials that have already begun to enroll.

In our previous blog, “Remote Working Arrangement – How to get it right?”, we talked about how the need for social distancing has led most of the employers, across the globe, to make work-from-home arrangements for their employees. As we continue to stay indoors and combat COVID-19, keeping aside some time every day to read and watch useful resources on important industry topics can be very helpful. Cytel's team of oncology trial design and advanced analytics experts have been hosting a series of complimentary webinars covering a range of innovative topics including adaptive design, machine learning, estimands and trial design software. In this post, we offer you a recap of the webinars we conducted in the past few weeks. You can register for the upcoming webinars in our oncology series by clicking on the button below.

There are now over 950 trials registered, which means that 250 new trials were registered in the past week.

Only 540 of these are currently recruiting patients. This would suggest that a number of trials are failing to reach recruitment targets. The most successful trials, though, appear to suggest otherwise. They are recruiting at an unprecedented rate.