Evolving Longitudinal Patient Histories and Re-enrollment in Master Protocol Trials

TL;DR

This paper develops new statistical methods for analyzing master protocol trials with re-enrollment, defining meaningful estimands and estimators that account for within-participant correlation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework for defining estimands and estimators in master protocol trials with re-enrollment, ensuring valid inference and improved efficiency.

Findings

The proposed estimators are asymptotically normal with cluster-robust variance.

Simulation studies demonstrate the estimators' accuracy and efficiency.

Application to a cystic fibrosis trial illustrates practical utility.

Abstract

A master protocol trial uses a single overarching protocol to test multiple therapies, often across several diseases or subtypes. Although such trials offer considerable flexibility and efficiency, their constrained and non-uniform treatment assignment raises two core challenges: precisely defining treatment effects and conducting robust, efficient inference. These challenges intensify when participants can re-enroll to receive additional eligible therapies over time. To address these issues, we first define a clinically meaningful estimand with a clear population specification for master protocol trials that allow re-enrollment across multiple episodes. Specifically, we define the episode-specific entire concurrently eligible (ECE) population, which preserves the integrity of randomized comparisons and remains invariant to randomization ratios and operational formats. We then introduce a per-episode added-effect estimand that aggregates episode-specific effects into an interpretable overall measure. For inference, we develop weighting and post-stratification estimators under the same minimal assumptions as conventional randomized trials, with model-assisted covariate adjustment to improve efficiency. We establish asymptotic distributions for all estimators and provide cluster-robust variance estimators that properly account for within-participant correlation induced by re-enrollment. We evaluate our methods through extensive simulations and apply our methods to SIMPLIFY, a master protocol trial comparing continuation versus discontinuation of two common cystic fibrosis therapies. All analyses are conducted using the \textsf{R} package \textsf{RobinCID}.