BOIN Suite: A Software Platform to Design and Implement Novel Early-Phase Clinical Trials

Abstract

PURPOSE Using novel Bayesian adaptive designs has great potential to improve the efficiency of early-phase clinical trials. A major barrier for clinical researchers to adopt novel designs is the lack of easy-to-use software. Our purpose is to develop a user-friendly software platform to implement novel clinical trial designs that address various challenges in early-phase dose-finding trials. METHODS We used R Shiny to develop a web-based software platform to facilitate the use of recent novel adaptive designs. RESULTS We developed a web-based software suite, called Bayesian optimal interval (BOIN) suite, which includes R Shiny applications to handle various clinical settings, including single-agent phase I trials with and without prior information, trials with late-onset toxicity, trials to find the optimal biological dose based on risk-benefit trade-off, and drug combination trials to find a single maximum tolerated dose (MTD) or the MTD contour. The applications are built using the same software architecture to ensure the best and a uniform user experience, and they are developed using a proven software development standard operating procedure to ensure accuracy, robustness, and reproducibility. The suite is freely available with internet access and a web browser without the need of installing any other software. CONCLUSION The BOIN suite allows clinical researchers to design various types of early-phase clinical trials under a unified framework. This work is extremely important because it not only advances the clinical research and drug development by facilitating the use of novel trial designs with optimal performance but also enhances collaborations between biostatisticians and clinicians by disseminating novel statistical methodology to broader scientific communities through user-friendly software. The BOIN suite establishes a KISS principle: keep it simple, but smart.