Digital Twins as Synthetic Controls in Single-Arm Trials

TL;DR

This paper advocates for using digital twins as synthetic control arms in single-arm clinical trials, leveraging machine learning to improve treatment effect estimates and align with FDA guidance.

Contribution

It introduces digital twins as outcome-model-based synthetic controls, reviews statistical methods, and demonstrates their application with real trial data.

Findings

Digital twins improve robustness of treatment effect estimates.

Power and sample size formulas are derived for trial planning.

Reanalysis of ALS and Huntington's disease trials illustrates practical utility.

Abstract

Single-arm trials are an important study design for evaluating drug efficacy and safety without enrolling patients into a control arm. Although they do not provide the gold-standard evidence of randomized controlled trials, they are increasingly used in clinical development as they offer an efficient, ethical, and practical alternative. A wide variety of approaches can be used to construct control comparators and estimate treatment effects, from fixed comparators informed by clinical knowledge to data-based and model-based patient-level comparators, also known as synthetic controls. Powerful and flexible machine learning models can allow outcome-model-based synthetic controls to overcome key limitations of direct data-based approaches, yield more robust estimates of treatment effects, and provide a principled way to incorporate corrections or encode additional assumptions when external data are not directly comparable. In this work, we argue that outcome-model-based synthetic control arms are an important tool for single-arm trials. We focus on digital twins, personalized predictions of disease progression generated from machine learning models trained on historical datasets, which naturally leverage these flexible approaches. We review doubly robust estimators, present power and sample size formulas, and discuss trade-offs in selecting historical data for training and analysis. We also outline practical considerations for deploying digital twins within the framework of recent FDA draft guidance on the use of artificial intelligence in drug development. Finally, we reanalyze data from trials in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and Huntington's disease to demonstrate the proposed methods.