Adaptive Seamless Subgroup Enrichment Design and Novel Strategies for Expediated Drug Development

Music City Center 

To support the expedited drug development that addresses unmet medical needs in heterogenous patient population, seamless phase 2/3 design that makes the phase switching decision based on an early surrogate endpoint is gaining more popularity in practice. For also catering to potentially more beneficial patient subgroups based on predictive biomarkers, it is appealing to incorporate the subgroup enrichment feature into the seamless phase 2/3 design. However, the sample size planning for such a complex adaptive design is challenging, as it must strike a balance among shortening development timeline, mitigating development risks, and accounting for uncertainty related to subgroup effects. To fill this gap, we propose a flexible seamless phase 2/3 design framework with population selection and sample size re-estimation using a surrogate endpoint. We elucidate the patterns of the overall type I error for the proposed adaptive design and propose an easy-to-implement approach to control the overall type I error. Extensive simulation studies are conducted to demonstrate the advantages of our proposal design compared to the fixed-sample design in terms of efficiency, power, and timeline saving.

Adaptive design

Subgroup enrichment

Heterogenous treatment effect