Abstract

MCP‐Mod has been established as analysis method for investigating the dose‐response (DR) relationship and dose finding in clinical Phase II trials. While most work on MCP-Mod focusses on the efficacy DR relationship, in 2015, Tao, Lin, Pinheiro and Shih (2015) extended MCP-Mod to the joint modelling of efficacy and safety endpoints in “Dose Finding Method in Joint Modeling of Efficacy and Safety Endpoints in Phase II Studies”. Their proposed algorithm defines several decision criteria, which majorly impact results or even terminate the algorithm. This viewpoint investigates the robustness of two of these decision criteria. While the criterion on the relationship between the maximum safety dose and minimum effective dose is reasonable and robust, there exist some advantages applying a more generous criterion to establish proof of concept for safety. Increasing the proposed significance level in establishing proof of concept for the safety DR relationship, helps to identify non-flat safety DR relationships which ultimately improves final estimation of the optimal dose.

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