Over the past decade, a new trend began to emerge, changing the way that clinical trials are conducted. Where-as placebo-controlled randomized trials control trials remain the gold standard, in some situations synthetic control arms can be used instead. Synthetic control arms leverage real world data from various sources or evaluations of historical clinical data to demonstrate the positive effects of a new therapy or treatment, without the need to use a placebo or standard of care as a control.

This method saves sponsors time and money and can be particularly valuable for oncology and rare disease trials faced with recruitment challenges and ethical issues.

Join Kristian Thorlund, SVP, Real World Analytics at Cytel, in this webinar replay as he introduces synthetic control arms and discusses the validity of data, results and interpretations. 

Meet the Speaker

Dr. Kristian Thorlund is a Professor of Biostatistics at McMaster University and Senior Vice President of Real World Evidence at Cytel. Dr. Thorlund is a world-renowned biostatistician. He ranks among the top 1% highly cited researchers internationally in the past decade, has published several hundred peer reviewed research papers in medical and statistics journals. His research focuses on Bayesian statistical methods for evidence synthesis, innovative clinical trial designs, real world analytics, and global decision-making. His teaching and educational efforts focuses on making complex Bayesian methods widely applicable and interpretable to the global clinical research community. Dr. Thorlund sits on several clinical trial data monitoring committees and has been the principal statistician for over 50 completed clinical trials. Dr. Thorlund also frequently advises ministries of health on both discovery and delivery of health care.