Cytel Blog

In clinical development, a high-quality evidence package is a prerequisite for a new therapy to gain approval from regulators and other key decision-makers. As such, the quality of your clinical data is one of the key factors determining whether an effective new therapy reaches patients.

Implementing a data strategy can help to protect the quality of your evidence package. However, many companies start planning their strategy quite late in the development process, which makes it difficult to address (sufficiently address) the complex considerations involved. As we explore in our new eBook, a data strategy planned well in advance of starting Phase 1 and following the industry’s best practices can help you reduce risk, expedite clinical development, and successfully achieve your business objectives.

Download the new eBook, “Are you Harnessing the Power of your Clinical Data?” to find out how to optimize your data strategy to advance clinical development.

In our previous blog, we talked about the value of planning a data strategy for the entire duration of your program (i.e., a ‘program-wide’ strategy). However, it is also important to plan for specific phases of clinical development, because they each have unique challenges. Below we discuss the major challenges commonly encountered in Phase 1 and Phase 2 studies, and the tactics you can use to resolve them. An upcoming article will engage with challenges in Phase 3 and post-market.

The Cytel Trial Design Innovations (CTDI) Webinar Series recently hosted a webinar on designing event-based studies. Such studies are essential to designing high-efficiency clinical trials in certain therapeutic areas, but they add a number of challenges to the already complex landscape of adaptive trials.

The webinar was held on January 23rd, featuring Biostatistician and pioneering Bayesian trial-designer Pantelis Vlachos. We had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Vlachos and speak about innovative trial designs and their benefits, adaptations and interim looks in oncology and cardiovascular, the challenges of designing event-based studies more generally, and how Cytel’s array of software tools, particularly East^®, has enabled trial sponsors to fully consider their options in the design of high-efficiency clinical trials.

January’s Cytel Trial Design Innovations (CTDI) Webinar Series will feature Biostatistician and pioneering Bayesian trial-designer Pantelis Vlachos. Next week, Dr. Vlachos will speak on high-efficiency trial design for Event-Based Studies, particularly in oncology and cardiovascular trials. In this blog post, we offer a glimpse of Dr. Vlachos’ last CTDI Webinar (February 2019) on high-efficiency trial design using enrichment strategies.

Don't miss next week's webinar "Designing Event-based Studies: Reduce Sample Size and Increase Predictability"! Click on the button below to register.

With only two weeks left for this fabulous year to end, we would like to thank all our blog subscribers and new readers for following and appreciating the Cytel blog. This year, we collaborated with several experts from both within and outside the company to bring to you a range of interesting topics including real-world evidence, AI, challenges in rare diseases, patient-reported outcomes, data management, and our popular series “The Good Data Submission Doctor” and “Career Perspectives”. In this blog, we share with you the top 5 Cytel blogs that resonated most with our community in 2019.

Subscribe to Cytel blog and stay updated on the latest developments in the industry.

Cytel is delighted to have Kannan Natarajan speaking at the “Complex Innovative Trial Design Symposium and East User Training” on November 6 in Boston, MA. We got a chance to sit down with Kannan and talk about his career in statistics, the changing role of statisticians, his views on evolving statistical thinking, estimands and relevance of technology in the context of rare diseases.

PhUSE EU Connect 2018 took place in Germany’s financial capital Frankfurt, 4th - 7th November and brought together a range of experts to tackle the most pressing issues facing statistical programmers today. The agenda was superb with 143 presentations in 16 different streams and nearly 30 posters. This year’s event theme ‘Future Forward’ did not disappoint and there were some very thought-provoking talks on the drug development industry's challenges and  what we can do in the future to meet these challenges. Additional hot topics were: Analytical Risk Based Monitoring, Machine Learning, and Data Standards and Governance. We found this year's event informative and well attended. 

In this blog, we share the contributed posters and presentations from our Statistical Programmers and summarize some of the particular highlights from the sessions and posters that our team members attended.

In this blog, we talk with Robert Greene, Founder and President of the HungerNDThirst Foundation, about his upcoming presentation at Cytel’s East User Group Meeting on 14th and 15th November at Merck in Darmstadt, Germany. Robert will bring a fresh perspective to the discussion of the role statisticians can play in enhancing the position of patients in clinical trials. Patient-centricity is a key topic in modern drug development, and this session aims to encourage statisticians to question the importance of a more patient-centric approach within their field.

Cytel biostatisticians Cyrus Mehta and Lingyun Liu, together with Charles Theuer, CEO of TRACON Pharmaceuticals have recently co-authored a publication in the journal Annals of Oncology: “ An Adaptive Population Enrichment Phase 3 Trial of TRC105 and Pazopanib Versus Pazopanib Alone in Patients with Advanced Angiosarcoma (TAPPAS Trial)”. The paper explores the features of this innovative population enrichment, adaptive sample size re-estimation trial and how it overcomes some fundamental challenges of clinical development in ultra-orphan oncology indications. The publication is timely, in the context of the August 2018 news that the FDA has launched a complex and innovative designs pilot program to facilitate and advance the use of complex adaptive, Bayesian, and other novel clinical trial designs in late-stage drug development. The initiative seeks to further innovation by allowing the FDA to publicly discuss those trial designs that are being considered through the pilot program. Indeed, the TAPPAS trial incorporated regulatory input from both the FDA and EMA and received a Special Protocol Assessment from the FDA. As of the date of publication, the authors were not aware of any other pivotal population enrichment trial that has been implemented in oncology, and therefore the paper’s deconstruction of the design’s key elements will be invaluable to researchers considering similar innovative approaches.

Cytel data scientists apply advanced statistical techniques including predictive modeling of biological processes and drug interactions to unlock the potential of big data.

In this blog we talk to Munshi Imran, who is based in Pune, India to find out more about his career path, current role at Cytel and his interests outside of work.