Cytel Blog

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, Paul Terrill, Director of Strategic Consulting at Cytel outlines his blueprint for ensuring smooth communication between statistical and clinical stakeholders. Paul draws upon his 20 years of experience working as a statistician and his training background to share his guidelines for success. Whether you are a statistician looking to hone your project communication skills, or a clinician keen to maximize the benefit of statistical input to your trial, this article will provide helpful pointers.

This is the third in our blog series ' The Good Data Submission Doctor' in which Angelo Tinazzi, Director of Standards, Systems and CDISC Consulting at Cytel tackles key issues in preparing data for CDISC submission. In the previous “Good Data Submission Doctor” blog Angelo discussed his top 5 SDTM FAQ; in this article he turns his attention to the top FAQs for  ADaM. Read on for Angelo's insights.

In this second post of the “Good Data Submission Doctor” ( read my first post The Master Recipe: Quality and Attention to Detail Matter here) I would like to go through some of my favorite SDTM Frequently Asked Questions. These are questions I regularly receive in my capacity as a CDISC Subject Matter Expert, either from my colleagues or from the sponsor. Let’s start by taking a look at five of the most recent.

One of my wife’s favorite TV shows is ‘Quattro Ristoranti’ (Four Restaurants). In each episode of the show, 4 restaurants of the same style are assessed and the one getting the best evaluation wins the prize. One of the first things the TV presenter Alessandro Borghese, a famous Italian chef, does while visiting the restaurant is to assess (of course!) the kitchen and how much the kitchen and its tools are cleaned. This assessment could have a big impact on the final outcome regardless of the quality of the food served in the restaurant .... the state of the kitchen and its cleanliness influences Borghese’s faith in the chef’s work.

This is exactly what could happen in a data submission to health authorities such as the FDA: the efficacy and safety of your drug are of course what matter, but lack of traceability, or poor or insufficient documentation might trigger questions and concerns from the reviewer. While this might not impact the overall final outcome of your submission, approval could be delayed if the reviewer starts questioning what you have done by requesting changes, or new deliverables to clarify the aspects that were not sufficiently clear in your original submission.

CDISC is a global, nonprofit charitable organization whose mission is ‘to inform patient care and safety through higher quality medical research’.  The organization delivers this mission through the development of data standards designed to streamline clinical research- these standard formats are increasingly expected for use in data submissions by regulatory authorities. Importantly, data standardization also brings significant benefits to the industry- in the CDISC 2014 Business Case (1),  it is noted that:

 “For those developing regulatory eSubmissions, using updated baseline numbers for the time and cost of getting a drug to market, it can be found that ~ $180M can be saved per submission (18% of the total cost). An average of two years can be saved off of an average 12-year clinical development program lifecycle – just by standardizing data”.

It’s therefore critical that the biopharma and CRO industries develop the next generation of data managers, statisticians and programmers with strong knowledge of the CDISC standards.

Angelo Tinazzi has more than 20 years’ experience in data-management and statistical programming and is Director of Clinical Data Standards and Data Submission at Cytel.  He has been a member of the European CDISC Committee since 2015 and is a member of the CDISC ADaM team. Taking the next step in his journey as a data standards expert, Angelo is now a "candidate trainer" with CDISC –working towards becoming an “Authorized CDISC Instructor”.  In this blog we find out more from Angelo about his experiences and the role of the CDISC trainer.