Oct 7, 2016 8:29:00 AM
Adaptive designs have the potential to accelerate clinical development, and improve the probability of trial success. While the principle is simple- to reduce the uncertainty in clinical development by obtaining additional information from the ongoing trial- the statistical methodologies can be complex, and expert support is often required to conduct the clinical trial design. There's also...
Topics: Clinical Development Strategy, adaptive designs, adaptive trials, Adaptive Clinical Trials, Clinical Data, data manager, Data Management, EDC
Sep 29, 2016 9:28:14 AM
A paper "Best practices case studies for 'less well-understood' Adaptive designs", has been published by the DIA Scientific Working Group on Adaptive Designs as a twin document to the previously discussed "Challenges and Opportunities of 'Less Well Understood' Adaptive Designs". This publication furthers understanding by reviewing 10 important case studies and sharing details on their design...
Topics: Clinical Development Strategy, adaptive designs, adaptive trials, Adaptive Clinical Trials, adaptive sample size re-estimation, Seamless designs, Rare Disease, Multi-Arm Multi-Stage Studies, Multi-Arm Studies, EAST 6.4
Sep 27, 2016 9:24:00 AM
The Lung-MAP trial is an innovative biomarker driven 'precision medicine' study which evaluates five novel agents for the treatment of patients with advanced squamous cell carcinoma of the lung. As well as exploring therapeutic options for this indication, it also aims to improve the drug development process.
At a Cytel seminar earlier in the year, Antje Hoering of CRAB presented to...
Topics: Clinical Development Strategy, phase 2, Phase 3, Oncology, Precision Medicine, EDC
Sep 20, 2016 9:42:00 AM
Drug development is an expensive and risky business. To maximize a compound’s ultimate chances of commercial as well as regulatory success it’s imperative that sponsors are building up a strong understanding of its characteristics relative to competitors. This knowledge can support critical decisions along the development path, such as optimizing dosing, and selecting the best active...
Topics: pharmacology, pharmacometrics, clinical development, Clinical Development Strategy
Jun 23, 2016 7:21:06 AM
Vendor selection is a critical component of ensuring clinical trial success. A 2015 report (1) suggested that clinical outsourcing penetration will reach 72% by 2020- nearly 3 quarters of all clinical trials will be outsourced to professional CROs. The process of vendor selection and management may be managed by the clinical operations teams within smaller companies, or by outsourcing and...
Topics: Clinical Research Services, outsourcing, Clinical Development Strategy, EDC, database build
Jun 7, 2016 8:00:00 AM
At the recent CMO Summit East James ( Jim) Bolognese, Cytel’s Senior Director of Strategic Consulting, and Lou Vaickus,MD, FACP, Founder and President of aktaPD jointly explored how the critical connection between a CMO and a biostatistician can help enhance communication with internal and external stakeholders, ensure patient safety and ultimately improve clinical development efficiency....
Topics: Clinical Development Strategy, go-no-go, clinical development, biostatistics, p value
Nov 12, 2015 4:00:00 PM
Last week Cytel joined forces with Sanofi/Genzyme to devote a full day of workshops and talks related to modern methods in early phase oncology. Patrick Mitchell, an Associate Director of Statistical Sciences at Astra Zeneca, gave this talk on Bayesian go/no-go decision-making in an early phase oncology event study.
Astra Zeneca recently invited Cytel to take part in a collaborative initiative...
Topics: Bayesian Methods, Early Phase Trials, Clinical Development Strategy, go-no-go
Nov 5, 2015 3:34:15 PM
Oftentimes people perceive a tradeoff between speed and quality. The faster you do something the more likely you are to make mistakes. Then again, checking everything carefully means things take a longer time.
Right?
What if you could promise a team that could work 24-7?
Topics: Data Management, Clinical Research Services, Clinical Development Strategy
Sep 29, 2015 5:02:00 PM
The Head of the DIA’s Adaptive Design Working Group Asks Us to Consider 5 ‘Soft-Skills’ All Effective Statisticians Should Cultivate
The advent of adaptive designs has meant that statisticians have a new role to play in the drug development process. Not only are they responsible for tackling the precise statistical issues that can arise during the course of a study, but their knowledge and...
Topics: Statistical Analysis, Entrepreneurship, Clinical Development Strategy
Sep 4, 2015 10:30:00 AM
Our Client's Challenge:
Can knowledge of the relationship between biomarkers and clinical endpoints help us to optimize an early development program and improve the probability of selecting the right dose in Phase 3?
Our client approached us hoping to expedite dose-finding with biomarkers in Phase 1b, and to design an optimal Phase 2b clinical endpoint trial to maximize probability of correct...
Topics: Cytel Consulting, Early Phase Trials, Clinical Development Strategy, Proof-of-Concept, Case Study, Biomarkers, Simulations
Sep 1, 2015 4:01:39 PM
If you’re in the practice of conducting early phase clinical trials, you’ve probably heard that modern trial designs include a number of new methodologies. There’s CRM and BLRM, model-based methods versus rule-based methods, and a number of other developments that might affect your clinical strategy. Each of these methods affects operational, financial and regulatory objectives in unique ways.
As...
Topics: Bayesian Methods, CRM, Early Phase Trials, Clinical Development Strategy, BLRM
Jun 11, 2015 5:21:09 PM
When the FDA first began to require pharmaceuticals to perform cardiovascular outcome trials to establish the safety of certain new drugs, many worried that this new regulatory requirement would diminish investments in therapeutic areas like diabetes and obesity [1]. CVOTs are typically designed as massive time-to-event trials that need to enroll several thousands of patients to establish safety...
Topics: Cardiovascular, Clinical Development Strategy, Adaptive Clinical Trials
May 28, 2015 4:47:00 PM
Risks in drug development range from taking the wrong drugs forward to Phase 3 to investing in a drug development program at a time when regulatory standards are evolving, or competition is catching up with comparable products.
There is a particular source of risk, however, which deserves special attention. Currently, the pharmaceutical and biologics industry outsources approximately $25...
Topics: Data Management, Clinical Research Services, outsourcing, Clinical Development Strategy
May 20, 2015 5:56:47 PM
Seamless adaptive clinical trials have gained popularity for reducing the projected time it takes to complete the process of drug development. However, a study by Cuffe et al., shows that despite a tremendous amount of statistical knowledge about seamless trials, sponsors remain unsure about how to calculate the financial and operational costs of a seamless clinical development program [1]....
Topics: Phase 1, Early Phase Trials, Clinical Development Strategy, Phase 3, Adaptive Clinical Trials, phase 2
Apr 30, 2015 5:00:00 PM
Adaptive financing (not to be confused with adaptive licensing) explores how biotechs, pharmaceuticals and potential investors, can use adaptive designs for more strategic financial decision-making, as well as for efficient drug development.
“For example,” writes Zoran Antonijevic, Senior Director at Cytel Consulting, “Reduction in costs and development time can be accomplished by combining...
Topics: Clinical Development Strategy, Adaptive Clinical Trials, Adaptive Finance
Apr 23, 2015 3:53:00 PM
Last week the Cytel Blog discussed the benefits of using the Adaptive Maximizing Design [AM Design] for dose-finding trials involving clinical utility limiting therapies. However, there are other ways that a dose-finding trial can make use of frequent-adaptation maximizing designs. Here we look at what happens to early phase clinical development when an AM Design combines with another adaptive...
Topics: Cytel Consulting, Early Phase Trials, Clinical Development Strategy, Adaptive Clinical Trials, psychiatry and neuroscience
Apr 21, 2015 6:09:28 PM
“We shouldn’t use an adaptive design, our sample size is too small.”
Most clinical trial planners have heard this line of reasoning so often it has come to be taken as true. Never mind the fact that the first product to receive FDA approval using an adaptive sample size re-estimation design, was for a genetic condition affecting fewer than two thousand children worldwide [1].
Topics: Clinical Research Services, Rare Disease, Clinical Development Strategy, Adaptive Clinical Trials
Apr 9, 2015 11:37:00 AM
Last year. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery asked the FDA’s Tatiana Prowell (Hematology & Oncology Products Division) about the most common pitfalls confronting clinical trials in oncology. She cited the late stage evaluations of biomarkers as one of three critical issues leading to regulatory failure [1]. The primary lesson: those who want to test biomarkers need to start earlier.
OncoMed’s Eric...
Topics: Oncology, Predictive Enrichment, Precision Medicine, Clinical Development Strategy, Statistical Innovations in Clinical Development
Apr 2, 2015 1:32:00 PM
Midway through a trial is a terrible time to realize that you need a new strategy to complete the study. Sadly, it is typically midway through a trial when drug supply, patient recruitment and budget all tend to deviate from the planned development path. Sometimes this is because the initial plan utilized idealized assumptions, (i.e. non-random patient enrollment), which failed to give the...
Topics: Clinical Development Strategy, patient enrollment, enforesys
Mar 27, 2015 5:43:52 PM
We have often said that one of the greatest benefits of an adaptive clinical trial is the flexibility it affords for decision-making [1]. Often this flexibility is taken to mean that sponsors have some leeway to accommodate events - foreseen or unforeseen, challenging or advantageous - midway through a trial. However, when designing a trial, it is often possible to leverage this flexibility...
Topics: Clinical Development Strategy, Multi-Arm Studies