Online Program

Graphical Exploration of Response to Anti-Cancer Medicines and Patient Characteristics (302773)

Keywords: anti-cancer medicine, oncology, clinical trial, categorical data

When developing a new anti-cancer medicine, we often seek to graphically explore relationships between the response to medicine and characteristics such as demographics and disease characteristics, including chromosomal abnormalities. In early-phase clinical trials, like first time in human studies, a limited number of patients are exposed to the investigational drug, usually at different doses (until the optimal dose is defined). If the new medicine is a targeted therapy, the patients enrolled on trial may be more homogeneous in disease characteristics. In general, however, first time in human trials do not restrict enrollment to a narrow patient population; sample sizes are small and heterogeneous. In this talk, we look at different graphical presentations of these data and highlight the pros/cons of each graph.