Adaptive strategies in designing the simultaneous global drug development program

Abstract

ABSTRACTMany methods have been proposed to account for the potential impact of ethnic/regional factors when extrapolating results from multiregional clinical trials (MRCTs) to targeted ethnic (TE) patients, i.e., “bridging.” Most of them either focused on TE patients in the MRCT (i.e., internal bridging) or a separate local clinical trial (LCT) (i.e., external bridging). Huang et al. (2012) integrated both bridging concepts in their method for the Simultaneous Global Drug Development Program (SGDDP) which designs both the MRCT and the LCT prospectively and combines patients in both trials by ethnic origin, i.e., TE vs. non-TE (NTE). The weighted Z test was used to combine information from TE and NTE patients to test with statistical rigor whether a new treatment is effective in the TE population. Practically, the MRCT is often completed before the LCT. Thus to increase the power for the SGDDP and/or obtain more informative data in TE patients, we may use the final results from the MRCT to re-evaluate initial assumptions (e.g., effect sizes, variances, weight), and modify the LCT accordingly. We discuss various adaptive strategies for the LCT such as sample size reassessment, population enrichment, endpoint change, and dose adjustment. As an example, we extend a popular adaptive design method to re-estimate the sample size for the LCT, and illustrate it for a normally distributed endpoint.