Bayesian design of multi‐regional clinical trials with time‐to‐event endpoints

Sponsors often rely on multi‐regional clinical trials (MRCTs) to introduce new treatments more rapidly into the global market. Many commonly used statistical methods do not account for regional differences, and small regional sample sizes frequently result in lower estimation quality of region‐specific treatment effects. The International Council for Harmonization E17 guidelines suggest consideration of methods that allow for information borrowing across regions to improve estimation. In response to these guidelines, we develop a novel methodology to estimate global and region‐specific treatment effects from MRCTs with time‐to‐event endpoints using Bayesian model averaging (BMA). This approach accounts for the possibility of heterogeneous treatment effects between regions, and we discuss how to assess the consistency of these effects using posterior model probabilities. We obtain posterior samples of the treatment effects using a Laplace approximation, and we show through simulation studies that the proposed modeling approach estimates region‐specific treatment effects with lower mean squared error than a Cox proportional hazards model while resulting in a similar rejection rate of the global treatment effect. We then apply the BMA approach to data from the LEADER trial, an MRCT designed to evaluate the cardiovascular safety of an anti‐diabetic treatment.