Cytel Blog

Cytel has grown significantly over the last 30 years, with operations across North America, Europe, and India. All of our processes, talent, and expertise are applied to maximizing the value of clinical data. At Cytel, quality comes first, and our QA team are committed to ensuring processes are in place to support our services.

In this blog we talk to Meredith who lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, to find out more about her career path, current role at Cytel, and her interests outside of work.

A solid and robust QC process is one vital component of ensuring quality programming delivery. Angelo Tinazzi and Cedric Marchand presented at the PhUSE conference recently on the topic of ‘What Auditors want’. As part of this well received presentation, the duo discussed the question of independence of QC and how to make sure this is fully observed.

In this blog we’ll walk through their recommendations to ensure independence of QC in programming.

Imagine that it’s been three years since the completion of a trial, and that suddenly a regulatory body calls into question the findings:

• Was a particular trial site operating properly?
• Can you clarify an aspect of the results? 
• Why did you make a particular decision at an interim look?

Suddenly, your somewhat old data needs to be able to reproduce your initial findings. In such a case, how long would it take you to satisfy the regulatory body?

As more clinical trials make use of adaptive designs, investors have come to realize that high quality trial designs can result in significant improvements to a trial’s financial risk profile. Regardless of a trial’s eventual success or failure, a well-constructed design provides a drug with the highest possible probability of success while mitigating financial risk.

During an invited speakers session at the lnternational Society for Clinical Biostatistics, Cytel VP Yannis Jemiai was joined by R.N. Rodriguez from the SAS Institute and IR White (formerly of Stata), to discuss innovations in software for clinical trials.

Beyond Wild Horses: Developing Innovation at Cytel

A recent Cytel Seminar on Adaptive Statistical Designs featured a talk by Michael Elashoff (Patient Profiles) on Multivariate Approaches for Risk-Based Monitoring. Elashoff, a former statistical reviewer at the Food and Drug Administration, recommended combining cluster and rules based methods for statistical monitoring. Such adaptive monitoring approaches can substantially reduce the time and expense of data monitoring while ensuring consistently high data quality. 

This is the first of a three part post in which we will consider (i) improvements to trial quality that result from bundling data management with biostatistics, (ii) reductions in cost and study length that result from bundling data management with biostatistics, and (iii) the contributions of statistical innovation to clinical data management, such as those by Cytel Board member Professor Marvin Zelen (Research Professor and former Chair of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health.)