Innovative Strategies, Statistical Solutions and Simulations for Modern Clinical Trials


Book Description

"This is truly an outstanding book. [It] brings together all of the latest research in clinical trials methodology and how it can be applied to drug development.... Chang et al provide applications to industry-supported trials. This will allow statisticians in the industry community to take these methods seriously." Jay Herson, Johns Hopkins University The pharmaceutical industry's approach to drug discovery and development has rapidly transformed in the last decade from the more traditional Research and Development (R & D) approach to a more innovative approach in which strategies are employed to compress and optimize the clinical development plan and associated timelines. However, these strategies are generally being considered on an individual trial basis and not as part of a fully integrated overall development program. Such optimization at the trial level is somewhat near-sighted and does not ensure cost, time, or development efficiency of the overall program. This book seeks to address this imbalance by establishing a statistical framework for overall/global clinical development optimization and providing tactics and techniques to support such optimization, including clinical trial simulations. Provides a statistical framework for achieve global optimization in each phase of the drug development process. Describes specific techniques to support optimization including adaptive designs, precision medicine, survival-endpoints, dose finding and multiple testing. Gives practical approaches to handling missing data in clinical trials using SAS. Looks at key controversial issues from both a clinical and statistical perspective. Presents a generous number of case studies from multiple therapeutic areas that help motivate and illustrate the statistical methods introduced in the book. Puts great emphasis on software implementation of the statistical methods with multiple examples of software code (both SAS and R). It is important for statisticians to possess a deep knowledge of the drug development process beyond statistical considerations. For these reasons, this book incorporates both statistical and "clinical/medical" perspectives.




Small Clinical Trials


Book Description

Clinical trials are used to elucidate the most appropriate preventive, diagnostic, or treatment options for individuals with a given medical condition. Perhaps the most essential feature of a clinical trial is that it aims to use results based on a limited sample of research participants to see if the intervention is safe and effective or if it is comparable to a comparison treatment. Sample size is a crucial component of any clinical trial. A trial with a small number of research participants is more prone to variability and carries a considerable risk of failing to demonstrate the effectiveness of a given intervention when one really is present. This may occur in phase I (safety and pharmacologic profiles), II (pilot efficacy evaluation), and III (extensive assessment of safety and efficacy) trials. Although phase I and II studies may have smaller sample sizes, they usually have adequate statistical power, which is the committee's definition of a "large" trial. Sometimes a trial with eight participants may have adequate statistical power, statistical power being the probability of rejecting the null hypothesis when the hypothesis is false. Small Clinical Trials assesses the current methodologies and the appropriate situations for the conduct of clinical trials with small sample sizes. This report assesses the published literature on various strategies such as (1) meta-analysis to combine disparate information from several studies including Bayesian techniques as in the confidence profile method and (2) other alternatives such as assessing therapeutic results in a single treated population (e.g., astronauts) by sequentially measuring whether the intervention is falling above or below a preestablished probability outcome range and meeting predesigned specifications as opposed to incremental improvement.




Modern Things on Trial


Book Description

Leor Halevi tells the story of the Islamic trials of technological and commercial innovations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Shedding light on culture, commerce, and consumption in Cairo and other colonial cities, Modern Things on Trial is a groundbreaking account of Islam's material transformation in a globalizing era.




Modern Adaptive Randomized Clinical Trials


Book Description

Is adaptive randomization always better than traditional fixed-schedule randomization? Which procedures should be used and under which circumstances? What special considerations are required for adaptive randomized trials? What kind of statistical inference should be used to achieve valid and unbiased treatment comparisons following adaptive random




Modern Trials


Book Description




Modern Trials


Book Description




Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction


Book Description

How do lawyers, judges and jurors read novels? And what is at stake when literature and law confront each other in the courtroom? Nineteenth-century England and France are remembered for their active legal prosecution of literature, and this book examines the ways in which five novels were interpreted in the courtroom: Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Paul Bonnetain’s Charlot s’amuse, Henry Vizetelly’s English translation of Émile Zola’s La Terre, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. It argues that each of these novels attracted legal censure because they presented figures of sexual dissidence – the androgyne, the onanist or masturbator, the patricide, the homosexual and the lesbian – that called into question an increasingly fragile normative, middleclass masculinity. Offering close readings of the novels themselves, and of legal material from the proceedings, such as the trial transcripts and judicial opinions, the book addresses both the doctrinal dimensions of Victorian obscenity and censorship, as well as the reading practices at work in the courtroom. It situates the cases in their historical context, and highlights how each trial constitutes a scene of reading – an encounter between literature and the law – through which different forms of masculinity were shaped, bolstered or challenged.




Modern Trials


Book Description




Virtual Clinical Trials


Book Description

Successful drug development relies on accurate and efficient clinical trials to deliver the best and most effective pharmaceuticals and clinical care to patients. However, the current model for clinical trials is outdated, inefficient and costly. Clinical trials are limited by small sample sizes that do not reflect variations among patients in the real world, financial burdens on participants, and slow processes, and these factors contribute to the disconnect between clinical research and clinical practice. On November 28-29, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a workshop to investigate the current clinical trials system and explore the potential benefits and challenges of implementing virtual clinical trials as an enhanced alternative for the future. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.




Gender Trials


Book Description

This engaging ethnography examines the gendered nature of today's large corporate law firms. Although increasing numbers of women have become lawyers in the past decade, Jennifer Pierce discovers that the double standards and sexist attitudes of legal bureaucracies are a continuing problem for women lawyers and paralegals. Working as a paralegal, Pierce did ethnographic research in two law offices, and her depiction of the legal world is quite unlike the glamorized version seen on television. Pierce tellingly portrays the dilemma that female attorneys face: a woman using tough, aggressive tactics—the ideal combative litigator—is often regarded as brash or even obnoxious by her male colleagues. Yet any lack of toughness would mark her as ineffective. Women paralegals also face a double bind in corporate law firms. While lawyers depend on paralegals for important work, they also expect these women—for most paralegals are women—to nurture them and affirm their superior status in the office hierarchy. Paralegals who mother their bosses experience increasing personal exploitation, while those who do not face criticism and professional sanction. Male paralegals, Pierce finds, do not encounter the same difficulties that female paralegals do. Pierce argues that this gendered division of labor benefits men politically, economically, and personally. However, she finds that women lawyers and paralegals develop creative strategies for resisting and disrupting the male-dominated status quo. Her lively narrative and well-argued analysis will be welcomed by anyone interested in today's gender politics and business culture.