Cytel Blog

Recent years have witnessed improving survival outcomes for those struggling with a range of common kidney cancers. Scientists at Cytel recently published findings aiming to identify those baseline factors which influence a positive response to an established therapy. Such an investigation is critical to ensure that future treatment is informed by biomarker driven strategy.

Cytel is conducting a webinar series that focuses on target trial emulation and causal inference approaches using real world data. In collaboration with Dr. Miguel Hernán, Professor at Harvard University, Cytel is pioneering two “Head-to-Head Comparisons using Real World Data” studies, one in oncology one and in cardiovascular disease. These projects will occur in real time across this webinar series. Our presenters for the first webinar in this series were Dr. Miguel Hernán and Devon Boyne, Director of Epidemiology at Cytel. Continue reading this blog for a summary of the webinar, “Head to Head Comparisons Using Real World Data - The Time for Causal Inference is Now” conducted on July 7, 2020. Click on the button to access the webinar replay.

We also had the opportunity to interview Dr. Hernan on head-to-head comparisons. Read the interview here.

Supposing two treatments, A and B, need to be compared that have not been compared through a clinical trial. In the absence of such information, those treatments have been compared with each other via a third treatment, C (i.e., A to C and B to C) using indirect treatment comparison approaches.  Recent developments are challenging this status quo.  The increased availability of regulatory-grade RWD helps.  We can also now avoid some of the biases that used to plague the use of observational data.