Bayesian modeling and simulation to inform rare disease drug development early decision-making: Application to Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
Bayesian modeling and simulation to inform rare disease drug development early decision-making: Application to Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
Blog Article
Rare disease clinical popularfilm.blog trials are constrained to small sample sizes and may lack placebo-control, leading to challenges in drug development.This paper proposes a Bayesian model-based framework for early go/no-go decision making in rare disease drug development, using Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) as an example.Early go/no-go decisions were based on projections of long-term functional outcomes from a Bayesian model-based analysis of short-term trial data informed by prior knowledge based on 6MWT natural history literature data in DMD patients.Frequentist hypothesis tests were also applied as a reference analysis method.A number of combinations of hypothetical trial designs, drug effects and cohort comparison methods were assessed.
The proposed Bayesian model-based framework was superior to the frequentist method for making go/no-go decisions across all trial designs and cohort comparison methods in DMD.The average decision accuracy rates across all trial designs for the Bayesian and frequentist analysis methods were 45.8 and 8.98%, respectively.A decision accuracy rate of at least 50% was achieved for 42 and 7% of the trial designs under the Bayesian and frequentist analysis methods, respectively.
The frequentist method was limited to the hp pavilion 15-eg1053cl short-term trial data only, while the Bayesian methods were informed with both the short-term data and prior information.The specific results of the DMD case study were limited due to incomplete specification of individual-specific covariates in the natural history literature data and should be reevaluated using a full natural history dataset.These limitations aside, the framework presented provides a proof of concept for the utility of Bayesian model-based methods for decision making in rare disease trials.