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A nonparametric Bayesian basket trial design.

ABSTRACT: Targeted therapies on the basis of genomic aberrations analysis of the tumor have shown promising results in cancer prognosis and treatment. Regardless of tumor type, trials that match patients to targeted therapies for their particular genomic aberrations have become a mainstream direction of therapeutic management of patients with cancer. Therefore, finding the subpopulation of patients who can most benefit from an aberration-specific targeted therapy across multiple cancer types is important. We propose an adaptive Bayesian clinical trial design for patient allocation and subpopulation identification. We start with a decision theoretic approach, including a utility function and a probability model across all possible subpopulation models. The main features of the proposed design and population finding methods are the use of a flexible nonparametric Bayesian survival regression based on a random covariate-dependent partition of patients, and decisions based on a flexible utility function that reflects the requirement of the clinicians appropriately and realistically, and the adaptive allocation of patients to their superior treatments. Through extensive simulation studies, the new method is demonstrated to achieve desirable operating characteristics and compares favorably against the alternatives.

SUBMITTER: Xu Y

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6261711 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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A nonparametric Bayesian basket trial design.

Xu Yanxun Y Müller Peter P Tsimberidou Apostolia M AM Berry Donald D

Biometrical journal. Biometrische Zeitschrift 20180528 5

Targeted therapies on the basis of genomic aberrations analysis of the tumor have shown promising results in cancer prognosis and treatment. Regardless of tumor type, trials that match patients to targeted therapies for their particular genomic aberrations have become a mainstream direction of therapeutic management of patients with cancer. Therefore, finding the subpopulation of patients who can most benefit from an aberration-specific targeted therapy across multiple cancer types is important. ...[more]

PMID: 29808479

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Project description:BACKGROUND:The basket trial evaluates the treatment effect of a targeted therapy in patients with the same genetic or molecular aberration, regardless of their cancer types. Bayesian hierarchical modeling has been proposed to adaptively borrow information across cancer types to improve the statistical power of basket trials. Although conceptually attractive, research has shown that Bayesian hierarchical models cannot appropriately determine the degree of information borrowing and may lead to substantially inflated type I error rates. METHODS:We propose a novel calibrated Bayesian hierarchical model approach to evaluate the treatment effect in basket trials. In our approach, the shrinkage parameter that controls information borrowing is not regarded as an unknown parameter. Instead, it is defined as a function of a similarity measure of the treatment effect across tumor subgroups. The key is that the function is calibrated using simulation such that information is strongly borrowed across subgroups if their treatment effects are similar and barely borrowed if the treatment effects are heterogeneous. RESULTS:The simulation study shows that our method has substantially better controlled type I error rates than the Bayesian hierarchical model. In some scenarios, for example, when the true response rate is between the null and alternative, the type I error rate of the proposed method can be inflated from 10% up to 20%, but is still better than that of the Bayesian hierarchical model. LIMITATION:The proposed design assumes a binary endpoint. Extension of the proposed design to ordinal and time-to-event endpoints is worthy of further investigation. CONCLUSION:The calibrated Bayesian hierarchical model provides a practical approach to design basket trials with more flexibility and better controlled type I error rates than the Bayesian hierarchical model. The software for implementing the proposed design is available at http://odin.mdacc.tmc.edu/~yyuan/index_code.html.

Project description:BACKGROUND:In the era of targeted therapies, clinical trials in oncology are rapidly evolving, wherein patients from multiple diseases are now enrolled and treated according to their genomic mutation(s). In such trials, known as basket trials, the different disease cohorts form the different baskets for inference. Several approaches have been proposed in the literature to efficiently use information from all baskets while simultaneously screening to find individual baskets where the drug works. Most proposed methods are developed in a Bayesian paradigm that requires specifying a prior distribution for a variance parameter, which controls the degree to which information is shared across baskets. METHODS:A common approach used to capture the correlated binary endpoints across baskets is Bayesian hierarchical modeling. We evaluate a Bayesian adaptive design in the context of a non-randomized basket trial and investigate three popular prior specifications: an inverse-gamma prior on the basket-level variance, a uniform prior and half-t prior on the basket-level standard deviation. RESULTS:From our simulation study, we can see that the inverse-gamma prior is highly sensitive to the input hyperparameters. When the prior mean value of the variance parameter is set to be near zero (?0.5) , this can lead to unacceptably high false-positive rates (?40%) in some scenarios. Thus, use of this prior requires a fully comprehensive sensitivity analysis before implementation. Alternatively, we see that a prior that places sufficient mass in the tail, such as the uniform or half-t prior, displays desirable and robust operating characteristics over a wide range of prior specifications, with the caveat that the upper bound of the uniform prior and the scale parameter of the half-t prior must be larger than 1. CONCLUSION:Based on the simulation results, we recommend that those involved in designing basket trials that implement hierarchical modeling avoid using a prior distribution that places a majority of the density mass near zero for the variance parameter. Priors with this property force the model to share information regardless of the true efficacy configuration of the baskets. Many commonly used inverse-gamma prior specifications have this undesirable property. We recommend to instead consider the more robust uniform prior or half-t prior on the standard deviation.

Dataset Information

A nonparametric Bayesian basket trial design.

Publications

A nonparametric Bayesian basket trial design.

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