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Updated: Jul 3, 2025

Diagonal Method to Measure Synergy Among Any Number of Drugs
Published on: June 21, 2018
A new function for drug combination dose finding trials
1Department of Financial and Actuarial Mathematics, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, 215123, Jiangsu, China.
Abstract:
Combination drugs play an essential role in treating cancers. The challenging part of the combination drugs are to specify the dose-toxicity ordering, which means the sequences of dose escalation and de-escalation in process of dose findings should be pre-determined. In the paper, we extend a novel function of the continual reassessment method based on the combination of the normal distribution for drug-combination dose-finding trials and systematically evaluate its performance using a template of four performance measures EARS (Efficiency, Accuracy, Reliability, Selection). Dose escalation and deescalation rules are based on the nearest neighborhood continual reassessment method for a combination drug, and we specify all possible dose-toxicity orderings in the trial. Simulation demonstrates that the new design is efficient, accurate and reasonably reliable.
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