In October HEDS travelled to Adelaide, Australia, acting as the Scientific Secretariat for a workshop on the "Challenges of Early Crossover in Clinical Trial Design for Oncology", organised by the Australian ethics company, Bellberry. The purpose of the workshop was to bring together representatives of key stakeholders from around the world to discuss the issues around treatment switching with a view to identifying where there is agreement on appropriate approaches to address treatment switching in the design and analysis of oncology trials, and where further discussion or work is needed.
The workshop included a diverse group of international participants, with stakeholders represented including regulators (EMA, FDA, TGA), HTA agencies (NICE, IQWiG, PBAC, CADTH and US payers), patients and carers, ethicists, oncologists, academics and industry. HEDS' role was to provide background papers for participants, to present research undertaken on treatment switching, and to lead the development of outputs from the workshop - which will be forthcoming soon.
The HEDS team were Nick Latimer and Helen Bell