Group sequential designs for developing and testing biomarker-guided personalized therapies in comparative effectiveness research

Biomarker-guided personalized therapies offer great promise to improve drug development and improve patient care, but also pose difficult challenges in designing clinical trials for the development and validation of these therapies. We first give a review of the existing approaches, briefly for clinical trials in new drug development and in more detail for comparative effectiveness trials involving approved treatments. We then introduce new group sequential designs to develop and test personalized treatment strategies involving approved treatments. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.