A Comprehensive Comparison of the Continual Reassessment Method to the Standard 3 + 3 Dose Escalation Scheme in Phase I Dose-Finding Studies

BACKGROUND An extensive literature has covered the statistical properties of the Continual Reassessment Method (CRM) and the modifications of this method. While there are some applications of CRM designs in recent Phase I trials, the standard method (SM) of escalating doses after three patients with an option for an additional three patients SM remains very popular, mainly due to its simplicity. From a practical perspective, clinicians are interested in designs that can estimate the MTD using fewer patients for a fixed number of doses, or can test more dose levels for a given sample size. PURPOSE This article compares CRM-based methods with the SM in terms of the number of patients needed to reach the MTD, total sample size required, and trial duration. METHODS The comparisons are performed under two alternative schemes: a fixed or a varying sample approach with the implementation of a stopping rule. The stopping rule halts the trial if the confidence interval around the MTD is within a pre-specified bound. Our simulations evaluated several CRM-based methods under different scenarios by varying the number of dose levels from five to eight and the location of the true MTD. RESULTS CRM and SM are comparable in terms of how fast they reach the MTD and the total sample size required when testing a limited number of dose levels (<or=5), but as the number of dose levels increases, CRM reaches the MTD in fewer patients when used with a fixed sample of 20 patients. However, a sample size of 20-25 patients is not sufficient to achieve a narrow precision around the estimated toxicity rate at the MTD. LIMITATIONS We focused on methods with practical design features that are of interest to clinicians. However, there are several alternative CRM-based designs that are not investigated in this manuscript, and hence our results are not generalizable to other designs. CONCLUSIONS We show that CRM-based methods are an improvement over the SM in terms of accuracy and optimal dose allocation in almost all cases, except when the true dose is among the lower levels.