Modernizing the assessment and reporting of adverse events in oncology clinical trials using complementary statistical approaches: a case study of the MOTIVATE trial.

The reporting of adverse events (AEs) is fundamental to characterize safety profiles of novel therapeutic drug classes, however, conventional analysis strategies are suboptimal tools for this task. We therefore attempted to contribute to the modernization of AE analysis by encompassing the dimension of time, the duration and the recurrent nature of AEs induced by these extended treatment durations. This paper presents and highlights the benefits of alternative approaches to modernize AE analysis based on the MOTIVATE prospective study modeling immune-related AEs (irAEs) in patients with solid tumors (regardless of the primary site) treated with immune checkpoint inhibitor irrespective of disease stage. The probability of presenting an irAE over time was estimated using the prevalence function. The time-to-onset (TTO) and the mean number of recurrent irAEs were also assessed. Among the 147 patients analyzed, 39.7% had a melanoma, 37.7% a non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and 74.8% were treated for metastatic disease. Despite a higher proportion of melanoma patients presenting at least one irAE, the prevalence of irAEs was lower in melanoma than in NSCLC patients over time. TTO analysis showed that irAEs occurred earlier in NSCLC patients whereas melanoma patients experienced more recurrent irAEs over the long-term. The prevalence function of non-metastatic and metastatic patients revealed different long-term toxicity profiles. These alternative methodologies capture different toxicity patterns (time-to-onset, recurrent, acute episodic or long-term moderate AEs) and provide a more consistent safety assessment for new therapeutics, thereby assisting clinicians and health authorities in their therapeutic decision-making processes.

Modernizing adverse events analysis in oncology clinical trials using alternative approaches: rationale and design of the MOTIVATE trial.

In oncology clinical research, the analysis and reporting of adverse events is of major interest. A consistent depiction of the safety profile of a new treatment is as crucial in establishing how to use it as its antitumor activity. The advent of new therapeutics has led to major changes in the management of patients and targeted therapies or immune checkpoint inhibitors are administered continuously for months or even years. However, the classical methods of adverse events analysis are no longer adequate to properly assess their safety profile. Indeed, the worst grade method and time-to-event analysis cannot capture the duration or the evolution of adverse events induced by extended treatment durations. Many authors have highlighted this issue and argue that the analysis of safety data from clinical trials should be modernized by considering the dimension of time and the recurrent nature of adverse events. This paper aims to illustrate the limitations of current methods and discusses the value of alternative approaches such as the prevalence function, Q-TWiST, the ToxT and the recurrent event approaches. The rationale and design of the MOTIVATE trial, which aims to model the evolution of toxicities over time using the prevalence function in patients treated by immunotherapy, is also presented ( ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT03447483; Date of registration: 27 February 2018).