Biotech Values

[oldberkeley]

Clinical Cancer Advances 2012: Annual Report on Progress Against Cancer From the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
http://www.cancerprogress.net/pdf/CCA_2012.pdf

I'm carefully reading through this, trying to improve my layman's knowledge. I was really struck by this passage in the section about central nervous system cancers:

This year brought important validation for two novel clinical trial designs that are increasingly being used in CNS cancer research. The new designs allow trials to be completed with fewer patients, saving time and resources and, most importantly, helping patients benefit from new treatments faster.

The first, called the Bayesian-based trial design, uses accumulating study data in real time to guide the course of the trial. This flexibility increases the probability that patients will be assigned to treatment cohorts that show evidence of efficacy. To determine if Bayesian-based design would require fewer patients to answer a scientific question (eg, whether an experimental drug is better than placebo) than a traditional trial design, researchers retrospectively applied adaptive randomization to patient data from four phase II trials in patients with recurrent glioblastoma.4 They determined that if Bayesian design had been used in those studies, 30 fewer patients (approximately one third) in each trial would have been needed to achieve the same scientific results.[bolding mine]

I'm certainly not a statistician, but this seems like a quicker, more cost-efficient way to do things.