An adaptive enrichment design using Bayesian model averaging for selection and threshold-identification of predictive variables

Precision medicine is transforming healthcare by offering tailored treatments that enhance patient outcomes and reduce costs. As our understanding of complex diseases improves, clinical trials increasingly aim to detect subgroups of patients with enhanced treatment effects. Biomarker-driven adaptive enrichment designs, which initially enroll a broad population and later restrict to treatment-sensitive patients, are gaining popularity. However, current practice often assumes either pre-trial knowledge of biomarkers or a simple, linear relationship between continuous markers and treatment effectiveness. Motivated by a trial studying rheumatoid arthritis treatment, we propose a Bayesian adaptive enrichment design to identify predictive variables from a larger set of candidate biomarkers. Our approach uses a flexible modeling framework where the effects of continuous biomarkers are represented using free knot B-splines. We then estimate key parameters by marginalizing over all possible variable combinations using Bayesian model averaging. At interim analyses, we assess whether a biomarker-defined subgroup has enhanced or reduced treatment effects, allowing for early termination for efficacy or futility and restricting future enrollment to treatment-sensitive patients. We consider both pre-categorized and continuous biomarkers, the latter potentially having complex, nonlinear relationships to the outcome and treatment effect. Through simulations, we derive the operating characteristics of our design and compare its performance to existing methods.