Statistical controversies in clinical research: early-phase adaptive design for combination immunotherapies

Background: In recent years, investigators have asserted that the 3 + 3 design lacks flexibility, making its use in modern early-phase trial settings, such as combinations and/or biological agents, inefficient. More innovative approaches are required to address contemporary research questions, such as those posed in trials involving immunotherapies.

Design: We describe the implementation of an adaptive design for identifying an optimal treatment regimen, defined by low toxicity and high immune response, in an early-phase trial of a melanoma helper peptide vaccine plus novel adjuvant combinations.

Results: Operating characteristics demonstrate the ability of the method to effectively recommend optimal regimens in a high percentage of trials with reasonable sample sizes.

Conclusions: The proposed design is a practical, early-phase, adaptive method for use with combined immunotherapy regimens. This design can be applied more broadly to early-phase combination studies, as it was used in an ongoing study of two small molecule inhibitors in relapsed/refractory mantle cell lymphoma.