Pharmacogenetics in lung cancer for the lay doctor

Optimal marker-strategy clinical trial design to detect predictive markers for targeted therapy

In developing targeted therapy, the marker-strategy design (MSD) provides an important approach to evaluate the predictive marker effect. This design first randomizes patients into non-marker-based or marker-based strategies. Patients allocated to the non-marker-based strategy are then further randomized to receive either the standard or targeted treatments, while patients allocated to the marker-based strategy receive treatments based on their marker statuses. Little research has been done on the statistical properties of the MSD, which has led to some widespread misconceptions and placed clinical researchers at high risk of using inefficient designs. In this article, we show that the commonly used between-strategy comparison has low power to detect the predictive effect and is valid only under a restrictive condition that the randomization ratio within the non-marker-based strategy matches the marker prevalence. We propose a Wald test that is generally valid and also uniformly more powerful than the between-strategy comparison. Based on that, we derive an optimal MSD that maximizes the power to detect the predictive marker effect by choosing the optimal randomization ratios between the two strategies and treatments. Our numerical study shows that using the proposed optimal designs can substantially improve the power of the MSD to detect the predictive marker effect. We use a lung cancer trial to illustrate the proposed optimal designs.

Randomized clinical trials with biomarkers: design issues

Clinical biomarker tests that aid in making treatment decisions will play an important role in achieving personalized medicine for cancer patients. Definitive evaluation of the clinical utility of these biomarkers requires conducting large randomized clinical trials (RCTs). Efficient RCT design is therefore crucial for timely introduction of these medical advances into clinical practice, and a variety of designs have been proposed for this purpose. To guide design and interpretation of RCTs evaluating biomarkers, we present an in-depth comparison of advantages and disadvantages of the commonly used designs. Key aspects of the discussion include efficiency comparisons and special interim monitoring issues that arise because of the complexity of these RCTs. Important ongoing and completed trials are used as examples. We conclude that, in most settings, randomized biomarker-stratified designs (ie, designs that use the biomarker to guide analysis but not treatment assignment) should be used to obtain a rigorous assessment of biomarker clinical utility.