Cytel Blog

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.

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.

A disease is generally considered to be rare if it affects one patient per 200,000 people ⁽¹⁾ and most rare diseases affect far fewer than this. However, collectively rare diseases are relatively common, affecting 350 million patients worldwide ⁽²⁾. The path to diagnosis for these patients is often a long, difficult battle and even once the diagnosis is made, it is likely there will be no suitable treatment available.  For 90% of rare diseases, there is no approved therapy ⁽²⁾. There is, therefore, a pressing need to develop new, effective therapies that can bring hope to rare disease patients. However, the clinical development environment for life-threatening, rare diseases is fraught with challenges. By their very nature, rare indications have few patients and limited sample size. This scarcity of patients also results in a lack of available information and knowledge about the disease from the best endpoints, to the treatment effect size or the variability of response between subgroups.

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.

In this blog, we talk with Simon Kirby, former Senior Director at Pfizer, about his upcoming presentation at Cytel’s East User Group Meeting on 14th and 15th November at Merck Darmstadt, in Germany. Simon will address the topic of Selection Bias for Treatments with Positive Phase 2 Results and in this blog he explains why this is a key topic of particular relevance for pharmaceutical companies in today’s climate of accelerated development. He also talks with us about his career in statistics, current research, and his book Quantitative Decisions in Drug Development.

We are delighted that Stephen Senn will be joining us at the EUGM on November 14th and 15th in Darmstadt, Germany. In this blog, we sit down for a discussion with Stephen about his career in statistics, his advice for early career statisticians, his upcoming research, and the topic of his presentation at the East User Group Meeting “70 Years Old and Still Here: the Randomized Clinical Trial and its Critics”.

In this blog, we talk with Heiko Götte, Senior Expert Biostatistician at Merck about his upcoming presentation at Cytel’s East User Group Meeting on 14th and 15th November at Merck Darmstadt, in Germany. The topic Heiko will address is Decision Making in Development Programs with Targeted Therapies and he explains to us why this is a key topic for pharmaceutical companies today as they strive to improve their decision-making, and what delegates can expect to take away from the presentation.

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 Burnett, Robert Greene and Simon Kirby.

In this blog, we took the opportunity to talk to one of the speakers, Thomas Burnett, Senior Research Associate in Medical and Pharmaceutical Statistics at Lancaster University, about his presentation topic “Bayesian Optimization of Enrichment Designs” and his perspectives on what EUGM delegates will be able to take away from his talk.