Abstract

We consider the problem of designing a randomized trial for comparing two treatments versus a common control in two disjoint subpopulations. The subpopulations could be defined in terms of a biomarker or disease severity measured at baseline. The goal is to determine which treatments benefit which subpopulations. We develop a new class of adaptive enrichment designs tailored to solving this problem. Adaptive enrichment designs involve a preplanned rule for modifying enrollment based on accruing data in an ongoing trial. The proposed designs have preplanned rules for stopping accrual of treatment by subpopulation combinations, either for efficacy or futility. The motivation for this adaptive feature is that interim data may indicate that a subpopulation, such as those with lower disease severity at baseline, is unlikely to benefit from a particular treatment while uncertainty remains for the other treatment and/or subpopulation. We optimize these adaptive designs to have the minimum expected sample size under power and Type I error constraints. We compare the performance of the optimized adaptive design versus an optimized non-adaptive (single stage) design. Our approach is demonstrated in simulation studies that mimic features of a completed trial of a medical device for treating heart failure. The optimized adaptive design has 25% smaller expected sample size compared to the optimized non-adaptive design; however, the cost is that the optimized adaptive design has 8% greater maximum sample size. Open-source software that implements the trial design optimization is provided, allowing users to investigate the tradeoffs in using the proposed adaptive versus standard designs.

Disciplines

Biostatistics | Statistical Methodology

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