Cytel brings to you a new blog series on technology and Bayesian decision-making by Pantelis Vlachos, Principal/Strategic Consultant for Cytel. In his inaugural post Pantelis walks us through the features and benefits of our new offering, East Alloy™. East Alloy™ is a web-based extension of East for clinical trial design that blends the pace of SaaS delivery, the ease of use and robustness of Cytel software, and the velocity of cloud-based computing. Gain some behind-the-scenes insights into the development of this new module and understand how your company can leverage East Alloy to conduct computationally intensive designs with ease, confidence, and speed.
Ours is a high-risk, high-reward industry. The cost of drug development, failure rate and human cost associated with prolonged participation in a trial turn out to be steep in case of an ineffective trial. As companies try to overcome these challenges and seek new levels of clinical trial efficiency, adoption of innovative or computationally intensive designs like Bayesian methods has become a common practice. However, developing and maintaining a home-grown bespoke solution can involve risks as well as time investment. On-premise deployment models limit access to innovation and cannot support the most computationally intensive designs. Moreover, many biostatisticians may not readily have access to the cloud computing power to make these design approaches practical within the time constraints afforded for statistical design.
Cytel has been offering software products that provide flexibility with the design that can vary from something simple to anything complex and innovative. With East, we are continuing to try to develop a trial design and simulation platform that addresses all the needs of the users. East Alloy is an extension of East that enables clients to use both Cytel-invented and Cytel-curated engines within an intuitive graphical user interface to complete computationally intensive designs. It will enable our clients to incorporate innovative statistical methodologies and Bayesian approaches into routine trial design. Designs like Bayesian Group Sequential, Bayesian MAMS and Bayesian Dose-Finding will now be easily accessible to all. This in the long run, will accelerate the access of patients to efficacious drugs and enable the sponsors to become more responsible stewards of patients’ health.
With East Alloy, our users can leverage the power of cloud computing anytime and anywhere with virtually no IT burden as it is a zero-install web-native software. Backed by Cytel verification, maintenance, and support, East Alloy users can trust adaptive methodologies today and sustain them into the future.
I introduce the use of East Alloy in more details in a Cytel webinar. You can access the replay by clicking on the button.
About Pantelis Vlachos
Pantelis is Principal/Strategic Consultant for Cytel, Inc. based in Geneva. He joined the company in January 2013. Before that, he was a Principal Biostatistician at Merck Serono as well as a Professor of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University for 12 years. His research interests lie in the area of adaptive designs, mainly from a Bayesian perspective, as well as hierarchical model testing and checking although his secret passion is Text Mining. He has served as Managing Editor of the journal “Bayesian Analysis” as well as editorial boards of several other journals and online statistical data and software archives.
