Design and evaluation of an external control arm using prior clinical trials and real-world data

Steffen Ventz, Albert Lai, Timothy F. Cloughesy, Patrick Y. Wen, Lorenzo Trippa, Brian M. Alexander

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

60 Scopus citations

Abstract

Purpose: We discuss designs and interpretable metrics of bias and statistical efficiency of "externally controlled" trials (ECT) and compare ECT performance to randomized and single-arm designs. Experimental Design: We specify an ECT design that leverages information from real-world data (RWD) and prior clinical trials to reduce bias associated with interstudy variations of the enrolled populations. We then used a collection of clinical studies in glioblastoma (GBM) and RWD from patients treated with the current standard of care to evaluate ECTs. Validation is based on a "leave one out" scheme, with iterative selection of a single-arm from one of the studies, for which we estimate treatment effects using the remaining studies as external control. This produces interpretable and robust estimates on ECT bias and type I errors. Results: We developed a model-free approach to evaluate ECTs based on collections of clinical trials and RWD. For GBM, we verified that inflated false positive error rates of standard single-arm trials can be considerably reduced (up to 30%) by using external control data. Conclusions: The use of ECT designs in GBM, with adjustments for the clinical profiles of the enrolled patients, should be preferred to single-arm studies with fixed efficacy thresholds extracted from published results on the current standard of care.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)4993-5001
Number of pages9
JournalClinical Cancer Research
Volume25
Issue number16
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 15 2019
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 American Association for Cancer Research.

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