Group sequential designs for cancer immunotherapy trial with delayed treatment effect

Cancer immunotherapy trials are frequently characterized by delayed treatment effects such that the proportional hazards assumption is violated and the log-rank test suffers a substantial loss of statistical power. To increase the efficacy of the trial design, a variety of weighted log-rank tests have been proposed for fixed sample and group sequential trial designs. However, in such a group sequential design, it is often not recommended for futility interim monitoring due to possible delayed treatment effect which could result a high false-negative rate. To resolve this problem, we propose a group sequential design using a piecewise weighted log-rank test which provides an event-driven approach based on number of events after the delayed time. That is, the interim looks will not be conducted until the planned number of events observed after the delay time. Thus, it avoids the possibility of false-negative rate due to the delayed treatment effect. Furthermore, with an event-driven approach, the proposed group sequential design is robust against the underlying survival, accrual and censoring distributions. The group sequential designs using Fleming-Harrington-($$) weighted log-rank test and a new weighted log-rank test are also discussed.