The development of new drugs starts far before they are even seen in clinical trials. The discovery of multiple candidate drugs occur early on in the development process, often as a result of new information about how a disease functions, large-scale screening of small molecules, or the release of a new technology.
After a promising drug has been found, pre-clinical studies can be performed. A pre-clinical study for a new drug is used to determine important information about toxicity and suitable dosage amounts. These studies can be in vitro (in cell culture) and/or in vivo (in animal models) and determine whether a treatment will continue to the clinical trials stage.
Clinical trials test whether these experimental treatments are safe for use in humans, and whether they are more effective in treating or preventing a disease when compared to existing treatments. Clinical trials consist of several stages, called phases, where each phase is focused on answering a different clinical question: Progression of a treatment to the next phase requires the study to meet several parameters to ensure a treatment’s safety or efficacy.
Phase 0: Is the new treatment safe to use in humans in small doses?
Phase I: Is the new treatment safe to use in humans in therapeutic doses?
Phase II: Is the new treatment effective in humans?
Phase III: Is the new treatment more effective than existing treatments?
Phase IV: Does the new treatment remain safe and effective post-market?
Key phases of a pharmaceutical clinical trial
Phase 0: Small dose safety
Phase 0 studies can help to streamline the other clinical trial phases. Phase 0 consists of giving a few patients small, sub-therapeutic doses of the new treatment. This is to make sure that the new treatment behaves as expected by researchers and isn’t harmful to humans prior to using higher doses in phase I trials.
Phase I: Therapeutic dose safety
Phase I studies evaluate the safety of various doses of the new treatment in humans. This takes several months with typically around 20-80 healthy volunteers. In some cases, such as in anti-cancer drug trials, the study participants are patients with the targeted cancer type. A treatment may not pass phase I if the treatment leads to any serious adverse events.
Initial dosages in phase I studies can be informed based on data obtained during pre-clinical animal studies, and adjustments can be made to investigate the treatment’s side effect profile and develop an optimal dosing program. This could also include comparing different methods of giving a drug to patients (e.g., oral, intravenous etc.).
Phase II: Treatment efficacy
After passing phase I trials and having proven safety in humans, a new treatment advances to phase II studies designed to assess whether it may prevent or treat a disease. This phase can take between several months to 2 years, testing the new treatment in up to several hundred patients with the disease. Using a larger number of patients over a longer time period provides researchers with additional safety and effectiveness data, which is essential for the design of phase III trials.
To further test safety and efficacy, it is common to have a control group that receives either a placebo (a harmless pill or injection without the new treatment) or other current treatment (in trials where the disease is fatal unless treated e.g., cancer).
Phase III: Comparing to current treatments
Phase III studies are the last stage of a clinical trial before a new treatment can be approved for market use. The primary focus of a phase III study is to compare the safety and efficacy of a new treatment with current, existing treatments in patients with the target disease. Anywhere from several hundred to 3,000 patients may be included in a phase III study for between 1 to 4 years. Due to the scale of this phase, long-term or rare side effects are more likely to be uncovered.
Phase III studies are often randomised control trials, where patients will be randomly designated to different treatment groups. These groups may receive placebo, a current treatment (control group), the new treatment, or variations of the new treatment (e.g., different drug combinations). Randomised control trials are often double-blinded, where both the patient and the clinician administering their treatment do not know which treatment group they are assigned to.
A new treatment may continue to market and phase IV trials if the results prove it is as safe and effective as an existing treatment.
Phase IV: Post-market surveillance
If a new treatment passes phase III and is approved by the MHRA, FDA, or other national regulatory agency, it can be put to market. Phase IV is carried out in the post-market surveillance of the new treatment to keep updated on any emerging or long-term safety and efficacy concerns. This may include rare or long-term adverse side effects that were not yet discovered, or long-term analyses to see if the new treatment improves the life expectancy of a patient after recovery from disease.
Summary
Clinical trials are ultimately designed to mitigate risk. This includes the risk to the safety of trial participants by limiting the use of potentially unsafe treatments to small doses in a small number of patients before scaling up to testing therapeutic dose safety. Risk mitigation is not only for patient safety but also for preventing financial misspending as a treatment that is deemed unsafe in phase 0 would not proceed to the later, more costly clinical trial phases.
Not all clinical trials are the same, however, as each trial will have a different disease and treatment context. Trials for medical devices are somewhat different from pharmaceutical trials (for more information about the differences between medical device and pharma trials, click here). In addition, while sample sizes expand with phase progression, the required sample size for each trial and each phase is dependent on several factors including disease context (a rare disease may require lower sample sizes), patient availability (location of trial), trial budget and effect size. The sample size values mentioned earlier in this blog are purely indications of what each phase may use (for more information on how a biostatistician determines a suitable sample size, click here).
Medical devices and drugs share the same goal – to safely improve the health of patients. Despite this, substantial differences can be observed between the two. Principally, drugs interact with biochemical pathways in human bodies while medical devices can encompass a wide range of different actions and reactions, for example, heat, radiation (Taylor and Iglesias, 2009). Additionally, medical devices encompass not only therapeutic devices but diagnostic devices, as well (Stauffer, 2020).
More specifically medical device categories can include therapeutic and surgical devices, patient monitoring, diagnostic and medical imaging devices, among others; making it a very heterogeneous area (Stauffer, 2020). As such, medical device research spills over into many different fields of healthcare services and manufacturing. This research is mostly undertaken by SME’s ( small to medium enterprises) instead of larger well-established companies as is more predominantly the case with pharmaceutical research. SME’s and start-ups undertake the majority of the early stage device development, particularly where any new class of medical device is concerned, whereas the larger firms get involved in later stages of the testing process (Taylor and Iglesias, 2009).
Classification criteria for medical devices
There are strict regulations that researchers and developers need to follow, which includes general device classification criteria. This classification criterion consists of three classes of medical devices, the higher class medical device the stricter regulatory controls are for the medical device.
Class I, typically do not require premarket notifications
Class II, require premarket notifications
Class III, require premarket approval
Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Drug licensing and market access approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and international equivalents require manufacturers to undertake phase II and III randomised controlled trials in order to provide the regulator with evidence of their drug’s efficacy and safety (Taylor and Iglesias, 2009).
Key stages of medical device clinical trials
In general medical device clinical trials are smaller than drug trials and usually start with feasibility study. This provides a limited clinical evaluation of the device. Next a pivotal trial is conducted to demonstrate the device in question is safe and effective (Stauffer, 2020).
Overall the medical device trials can be considered to have three stages:
Feasibility study,
Pivotal study to determine if the device is safe and effective,
Post-market study to analyse the long-term effectiveness of the device.
Clinical evaluation for medical devices
Clinical evaluation is an ongoing process conducted throughout the life cycle of a medical device. It is first performed during the development of a medical device in order to identify data that need to be generated for regulatory purposes and will inform if a new device clinical investigation is necessary. It is then repeated periodically as new safety, clinical performance and/or effectiveness information about the medical device is obtained during its use.(International Medical Device Regulators Forum, 2019)
During the evaluative process, a distinction must be made between device types – diagnostic or therapeutic. The criteria for diagnostic technology evaluations are usually divided into four groups:
technical capacity
diagnostic accuracy
diagnostic and therapeutic impact
patient outcome
The importance of evaluation
Evaluations provide important information about a device and can indicate the possible risks and complications. The main measures of diagnostic performance are sensitivity and specificity. Based on the results of the clinical investigation the intervention may be approved for the market. When placing a medical device on the market, the manufacturer must have demonstrated through the use of appropriate conformity assessment procedures that the medical device complies with the Essential Principles of Safety and Performance of Medical Devices(International Medical Device Regulators Forum, 2019).The information on effectiveness can be observed by conducting experimental or observational studies.
Post-market surveillance
Manufacturers are expected to implement and maintain surveillance programs that routinely monitor the safety, clinical performance and/or effectiveness of the medical device as part of their Quality Management System (International Medical Device Regulators Forum, 2019). The scope and nature of such post market surveillance should be appropriate to the medical device and its intended use. Using data generated from such programs (e.g. safety reports, including adverse event reports; results from published literature, any further clinical investigations), a manufacturer should periodically review performance, safety and the benefit-risk assessment for the medical device through a clinical evaluation, and update the clinical evidence accordingly.
The use of databases in medical device clinical trials
The variations in the available evidence-base for devices means that, unlike with drugs, medical devices will typically require the consideration and analysis of data from observational studies in ascertaining their clinical and cost-effectiveness. Using modern observational databases has advantages because these databases represent continuous monitoring of the device in real-life practice, including the outcome (Maresova et al., 2020).
Bayesian methods as an alternative framework for evaluation
Bayesian methods for the analysis of trial data have been proposed as an alternative framework for evaluation within the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health. These methods provide flexibility and may make them particularly well suited to address many of the issues associated with the assessment of clinical and economic evidence on medical devices, for example, learning effects and lack of head-to-head comparisons between different devices.
Use of placebo in medical vs pharmaceutical trials
An additional key difference between drug and medical device trials are that use of placebo in medical device trials are rare. If placebo is used in a trial for surgical / implanted devices it would usually be a sham surgery or implantation of a sham device (Taylor and Iglesias, 2009). Sham procedures are high risk and may be considered unethical. Without this kind of control, however, there is in many cases no sure way of knowing whether the device is providing real clinical benefit or if the benefit experienced is due to the placebo effect.
Conclusion
In conclusion, there are many similarities between medical device and pharmaceutical clinical trials, but there are also some really important differences that one should not miss:
In general medical device clinical trials are smaller than drug trials.
The research is mostly undertaken by SME’s ( small to medium enterprises) instead of big well-known companies
Drugs interact with biochemical pathways in human bodies whereas medical devices use a wide range of different actions and reactions, for example, heat, radiation.
Medical devices can be used for not only diagnostic purposes but therapeutical purposes as well.
The use of placebo in medical device trials are rare in comparison to pharmaceutical clinical trials.
References:
Bokai WANG, C., 2017. Comparisons of Superiority, Non-inferiority, and Equivalence Trials. [online] PubMed Central (PMC). Available at: <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5925592/> [Accessed 28 February 2022].
Chen, M., Ibrahim, J., Lam, P., Yu, A. and Zhang, Y., 2011. Bayesian Design of Noninferiority Trials for Medical Devices Using Historical Data. Biometrics, 67(3), pp.1163-1170.
E, L., 2008. Superiority, equivalence, and non-inferiority trials. [online] PubMed. Available at: <https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18537788/> [Accessed 28 February 2022].
Gubbiotti, S., 2008. Bayesian Methods for Sample Size Determination and their use in Clinical Trials. [online] Core.ac.uk. Available at: <https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/74322247.pdf> [Accessed 28 February 2022].
U.S. Food and Drug Administration. 2010. Guidance for the Use of Bayesian Statistics in Medical Device Clinical. [online] Available at: <https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidance-documents/guidance-use-bayesian-statistics-medical-device-clinical-trials> [Accessed 28 February 2022].
van Ravenzwaaij, D., Monden, R., Tendeiro, J. and Ioannidis, J., 2019. Bayes factors for superiority, non-inferiority, and equivalence designs. BMC Medical Research Methodology, 19(1).
As the clinical research landscape becomes ever more complex and interdisciplinary alongside an evolving genomic and biomolecular understanding of disease, the statistical design component that underpins this research must adapt to accommodate this. Accuracy of evidence and speed with which novel therapeutics are brought to market remain hurdles to be surmounted.
While efficacy studies or non-inferiority clinical trials in the drug development space traditionally only included broad disease states usually with patients randomised to a dual arm of new treatment compared to an existing standard treatment. Due to patient biomarker heterogeneity, effective treatments could be left unsupported by evidence. Similarly treatments found effective in a clinical trial don’t always translate to show real world effectiveness in a broader range of patients.
Our current ability to assess individual genomic, proteomic and transcriptomic data and other patient bio-markers for disease, as well as immunologic and receptor site activity, has shown that different patients respond differently to the same treatment and, the same disease may benefit from different treatments in different patients – thus the beginnings of precision medicine. In addition to this is the scenario where a single therapeutic may be effective against a number of different diseases or subclasses of a disease based on the agent’s mechanism of action on molecular processes common to the disease states under evaluation.
Master protocols, or complex innovative designs, are designed to pool resources to avoid redundancy and test multiple hypotheses under one clinical trial, rather than multiple clinical trials being carried out separately over a longer period of time.
Due to this fairly novel evolution in the clinical research paradigm and also due to inherent flexibility within each study design, conflicting information related to the definition and characterisation of master protocols such as basket and umbrella clinical trials as well as cases in the published literature where the terms “basket” and “umbrella” trials have been used interchangeably or are ill-defined exists. For this reason a brief definition and overview of basket and umbrella clinical trials is included in the paragraphs that follow. Based on systematic reviews of existing research it seeks the clarity of consensus, before detailing some key statistical and operational elements of each design.
Diagram of a basket trial design.
Basket trial:
A basket clinical trial design consists of a targeted therapy, such as a drug or treatment device, that is being tested on multiple disease states characterised by a common molecular process that is impacted by the treatment’s mechanism of action. These disease states could also share a common genetic or proteomic alteration that researchers are looking to target.
Basket trials can be either exploratory or confirmatory and range from full randomised, controlled double-blinded designs to single arm designs, or anything in between. Single arm designs are an option when feasibility is limited and are more focused on the pre-clinical stage of determining efficacy or whether a particular treatment has clear-cut commercial potential evidenced by a sizable enough retreat in disease symptomology. Depending on the nuances of the patient populations being evaluated final study data may be analyses by pooling disease states or by each disease state separately. Basket trials allow drug development companies to target the lowest hanging fruit in terms of treatment efficacy, focusing resources on therapeutics with the highest potential of success in terms of real patient outcomes.
Diagram of an umbrella trial design.
Umbrella trial:
An umbrella clinical trial design consists of multiple targeted treatments of a single disease where patients can be sub-categorised into biomarker subgroups defined by molecular characteristics that may lend themselves to one treatment over another.
Umbrella trials can be randomised, controlled double-blind studies that in which each intervention and control pair is analysed independently of other treatments in the trial, or where feasibility issues dictate, they can be conducted without a control group with results analysed together in-order to compare the different treatments directly.
Umbrella trials may be useful when a treatment has shown efficacy in some patients and not others, they increase the potential for confirmatory trial success by honing in on patient sub-populations that are most likely to benefit due to biomarker characteristics, rather than grouping all patients together as a whole.
Basket & Umbrella trials compared:
Both basket and umbrella trials are typically biomarker guided. The difference being that basket trials aim to evaluate tissue-agnostic treatments to multiple diseases based on common molecular characteristics, whereas umbrella trials aim to evaluate nuanced treatment approaches to the same disease based on differing molecular characteristics between patients.
Biomarker guided trials have an additional feasibility constraint to non-biomarker guided trials in that the size of the eligible patient pool is reduced in proportion to the prevalence of the biomarker/s of interest within that patient pool. This is why master protocol methodology becomes instrumental in enabling these appropriately complex research questions to be pursued.
Statistical Concepts and considerations of basket and umbrella Trials
Effect size
Basket and umbrella trials generally require a larger effect size than traditional clinical trials, in order to achieve statistical significance. This is in a large part due to the smaller sample sizes and higher variance that comes with that. While patient heterogeneity in terms of genomic or molecular diversity, and thus expected treatment outcome, has been reduced by the precision targeting of the trial design, there is a certain degree of between-patient heterogeneity that can only be expected when relying on treatment arms of very small sample sizes.
If resources, including time, are tight then basket trials enable drug developers to focus on less risky treatments that are more likely to end in profitability. It should be noted that this does not always mean that the treatments that are rejected by basket trials are truly clinically ineffective. A single arm exploratory basket trial could end up rejecting a potential new treatment that, if subject to a standard trial with more drawn out patient acquisition and a larger sample size, would have been deemed effective at a narrower effect size.
Screening efficiency
If researchers carry out separate clinical studies for each biomarker of interest, then a separate screening sample needs to be recruited for each study. The rarer the biomarker, the larger the recruited screening sample would need to find enough people with the biomarker to participate in the study. This number needs to be multiplied by the number of biomarkers. A benefit of master protocols is that a single sample of people can be screened for multiple biomarkers at once, greatly reducing the required screening sample size.
For example, researchers interested in 4 different biomarkers could collectively reduce the required screening sample by three quarters compared to conducting separate clinical studies for each biomarker. This maximisation of resources can be particularly helpful when dealing with rare biomarkers or diseases.
Patient allocation considerations
If relevant biomarkers are not mutually exclusive a patient could fit into multiple biomarker groups for which treatment is being assessed in the study. In this scenario a decision has to be made as to which category the patient will be assigned and the decision process may occur at random where appropriate. If belonging to two overlapping biomarker groups is problematic in terms of introducing bias in small sample sizes, or if several patients have the same overlap, then a decision may be made to collapse the two biomarkers into a single group or eliminate one of the groups. If a rare genetic mutation is a priority focus in the study then feasibility would dictate that the patient be assigned to this biomarker group.
Sample Size calculations
Generally speaking, sample size calculation for basket trials should be based on the overall cohort, whereas sample size calculations for umbrella trials are typically undertaken individually for each treatment.
Basket and umbrella trials can be useful in situations where a smaller sample size is more feasible due to specifics of the patient population under investigation. Statistically designing for this smaller sample size typically comes at the cost of necessitating a greater effect size (difference between treatment and control) and this translates to lower overall study power and greater chance of type 1 error (false negative result) when compared to a standard clinical trial design. Despite these limitations master protocols such as basket or umbrella trials allow to evaluation of certain treatments to the highest possible level of evidence that otherwise might be too heterogeneous or rare to evaluate using a traditional phase II or III trial.
Randomisation and control
Randomised controlled designs are recommended for confirmatory analysis of an established treatment or target of interest. The control group typically treats patients with the established standard of care for their particular disease or, in the absence of one, placebo.
In master basket trials the established standard of care is likely to differ by disease or disease sub-type. For this reason it may be necessary for randomised controlled basket trials pair a control group with each disease sub-group rather than just incorporating a single overall control group and potentially pooling results from all diseases under one statistical analysis of treatment success. Instead it is worth considering if each disease type and corresponding control pair could be analysed separately to enhance statistical robustness in a truly randomised controlled methodology.
Single arm (non-randomised designs) are sometimes necessary for exploratory analysis of potential treatments or targets. These designs often require a greater margin of success (treatment efficacy) to be statistically significant as a trade-off for a smaller sample size required.
Blinding
To increase the quality of evidence, all clinical studies should be double blinded where possible.
To truly evaluate the effectiveness of a treatment without undue bias from a statistical perspective double-blinding is recommended.
Aside from increased risk of type 2 error that may be inherent in master protocol designs, there is a greater potential for statistical bias to be introduced. Bias can introduce itself in a myriad of ways and results in a reduction in the quality of evidence that a study can produce. Two key sources of bias are lack of randomisation (mentioned above) and lack of blinding.
Single armed trials do not include a control arm and therefore patients cannot be randomised to a treatment arm where double-blinding of patients, practitioners, researchers and data managers etc will prevent various types of bias creeping in to influence the study outcomes. With so many factors at play it is important not to overlook the importance of study blinding and implement it whenever feasible to do so.
If the priority is getting a new treatment or product to market fast to benefit patients and potentially save lives, accommodating this bias can be a necessary trade-off. It is after-all typically quite a challenge to have clinical data and patient populations that are at homogeneous and matched to any great degree, and this reality is especially noticeable with rare diseases or rare biomarkers.
Biomarker Assay methodology
The reliability of biologic variables included in a clinical trial should be assessed, for example the established sensitivity and specificity of particular assays needs to be taken into account. When considering patient allocation by biomarker group, the degree of potential inaccuracy of this allocation can have a significant impact on trial results, particularly when there is a small sample size. If the false positive rate of a biomarker assay is too high this will result in the wrong patients qualifying for treatment arms, in some cases this may reduce the statistical power of the study.
A further consideration of assay methodology pertains to the potential for non-uniform bio-specimen quality at different collection sites which may bias study results. A monitoring framework should be considered in order to mitigate this.
Patient tissue samples required for assays, can inhibit feasibility and increase time and cost in the short term and make study reproducibility more complicated. While this is important to note these techniques are in many cases necessary in effectively assessing treatments based on our contemporary understanding a many disease states such as cancer within the modern oncology paradigm. Without incorporating this level of complexity and personalisation into clinical research it will not be possible to develop evidence based treatments that translate into real-world effectiveness and thus widespread positive outcomes for patients.
Data management and statistical analysis
The ability to statistically analyse multiple research hypotheses at once within a single dataset increases efficiency at the biostatisticians end and allows frameworks for greater reproducibility of the methodology and final results, compared to the execution and analysis of multiple separate clinical trials testing the same hypotheses. Master protocols also enable increased data sharing and collaboration between sites and stakeholders.
Deloitte research estimated that master protocols can save clinical trials 12-15% in cost and 13-18% in study duration. These savings of course apply to situations where master protocols were a good fit for the clinical research context, rather than to the blanket application of these study designs across any or all clinical studies. Applying a master protocol study design to the wrong clinical study could actually end up increasing required resources and costs without benefit, therefore it is important to assess whether a master protocol study design is indeed the optimal approach for the goals of a particular clinical study or studies.
Lai TL, Sklar M, Thomas, N, Novel clinical trial solutions and statistical methods in the era of precision medicine, Technical Report No. 2020-06, June 2020
