Eliciting Priors and Tradeoffs to Assist in the Design of Clinical Studies

• Activity Number: 392 - What Do the Experts Believe? Leveraging Expert Knowledge to Develop Robust Informative Prior Belief Distributions to Aid Decision Making in Drug and Medical Device Development
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 1, 2017 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Bayesian Statistical Science
• Author(s): Joseph Kahn*
• Companies: Novartis Pharmaceuticals
• Keywords: Decision Analysis ; Clinical Development ; Prior Elicitation ; Clinical Trial Design ; Bayesian ; Expert Opinion

Abstract

Drug development entails a series of information-gathering trials. Good trial design requires clarity around key uncertainties and tradeoffs, which can be informed by a combination of expert opinion and modeling of available data. We review expert biases that should be avoided, and describe pragmatic elicitation methods in the context of the decision analysis cycle. Examples from past clinical trial design decisions illustrate the methods in practice.