Webinar Summary

Join the Pistoia Alliance Data Visualization community as we host a webinar on the impact of data visualization used to support signal detection in early clinical development with examples from cancer immunotherapy.

This presentation is a call to ‘put data before visualization’. We take the example of a popular display used in the pharmaceutical industry to present results of clinical trials in solid tumor oncology. A ‘waterfall plot’ is typically used to show the maximum change in tumor size during the treatment period compared to baseline. Unfortunately, these plots mask critical information about changes in tumor size over time. We show how simple ‘spaghetti’ plots offer a useful alternative to waterfall plots, in order to understand drug effects and support decision-making in early clinical development.
This presentation is a call to ‘put data before visualization’. We take the example of a popular display used in the pharmaceutical industry to present results of clinical trials in solid tumor oncology. A ‘waterfall plot’ is typically used to show the maximum change in tumor size during the treatment period compared to baseline. Unfortunately, these plots mask critical information about changes in tumor size over time. We show how simple ‘spaghetti’ plots offer a useful alternative to waterfall plots, in order to understand drug effects and support decision-making in early clinical development.

Speakers

Dr. Francois Mercer, Senior Principal Scientist, Roche
Francois Mercier is a biostatistician in oncology clinical development. He owns a Ph.D. in the Analysis and Modeling of Biological Systems and currently works at Roche-Genentech, in Basel. He has published >40 scientific papers and has made >30 public talks about biostatistics and clinical pharmacology in various forums.

Over the past 20+ years, he had many opportunities to appreciate the impact that “good” data visualization can have in enabling decision-making and problem-solving in drug development. He also observed the opposite, that is the disastrous effect that junk charts can have in introducing mistrust and confusion.

This is why, in his daily work, he promotes “unbiased and effective data viz” in early clinical development.

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