NEW YORK – The Global Coalition for Adaptive Research (GCAR) on Thursday said it will use $1 million in donations to sponsor an adaptive platform trial, dubbed Ovarian CanceRx, to evaluate the efficacy of multiple ovarian cancer treatments compared to current standard-of-care therapies.
Within the platform trial, researchers will also collect longitudinal data, which includes patients' tumor molecular characteristics.
The platform trial will include multiple treatment arms evaluating different therapies, or combinations of therapies, in newly diagnosed or recurrent, advanced ovarian cancer patients. A decision algorithm will determine which therapies are evaluated across study arms, and which are added or removed from the master trial in an adaptive fashion based on accumulating data. Patients in the trial who experience disease progression on a given treatment arm may be able to re-enroll in a different treatment arm.
GCAR, a global nonprofit that supports innovative clinical trials, is sponsoring Ovarian CanceRx, while partners such as the Ovarian Cancer Research Foundation, the Clearity Foundation, and a group of diverse stakeholders, have signed on to support the initiative.
The idea for the adaptive platform trial came out of a series of meetings organized by Andrew Lo of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which involved scientists, clinicians, patient advocates, investors, philanthropists, and industry representatives. In designing the trial, the stakeholders focused on overcoming roadblocks in treating ovarian cancer, such as the absence of validated biomarkers to guide therapies; the fact that therapeutic targets are harder to identify because ovarian tumors tend to have more copy number variations than gene mutations; and insufficient funding for trials generating longitudinal data.