An investigation into the two-stage meta-analytic copula modelling approach for evaluating time-to-event surrogate endpoints which comprise of one or more events of interest

Dimier, N. and Todd, S. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9981-923X (2017) An investigation into the two-stage meta-analytic copula modelling approach for evaluating time-to-event surrogate endpoints which comprise of one or more events of interest. Pharmaceutical Statistics, 16 (5). pp. 322-333. ISSN 1539-1612 doi: 10.1002/pst.1812

Abstract/Summary

Clinical trials of experimental treatments must be designed with primary endpoints that directly measure clinical benefit for patients. In many disease areas, the recognised gold standard primary endpoint can take many years to mature, leading to challenges in the conduct and quality of clinical studies. There is increasing interest in using shorter-term surrogate endpoints as substitutes for costly long-term clinical trial endpoints; such surrogates need to be selected according to biological plausibility, as well as the ability to reliably predict the unobserved treatment effect on the long-term endpoint. A number of statistical methods to evaluate this prediction have been proposed; this paper uses a simulation study to explore one such method in the context of time-to-event surrogates for a time-to-event true endpoint. This two-stage meta-analytic copula method has been extensively studied for time-to-event surrogate endpoints with one event of interest, but thus far has not been explored for the assessment of surrogates which have multiple events of interest, such as those incorporating information directly from the true clinical endpoint. We assess the sensitivity of the method to various factors including strength of association between endpoints, the quantity of data available and the effect of censoring. In particular, we consider scenarios where there exist very little data on which to assess surrogacy. Results show that the two-stage meta-analytic copula method performs well under certain circumstances and could be considered useful in practice, but demonstrates limitations that may prevent universal use.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/70081
Identification Number/DOI	10.1002/pst.1812
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Mathematics and Statistics Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Mathematics and Statistics > Applied Statistics
Publisher	Wiley
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