OnCo
ideasIdea

Emulate combination trials from real-world data to triage which ones to run

Many combinations are already used off-label. Careful analysis of what happened to those patients can rule out the pairs that clearly do not help before spending money on trials.

Target trial emulation with clinico-genomic databases can estimate effects of combinations that are used in practice but never randomised. Emulations cannot replace trials but can deprioritise pairs with no signal and flag those with large effects. The proposal is a standing programme that emulates every combination used in over 200 patients in the database and publishes ranked results with pre-registered protocols.

Hypothesis
Combinations flagged as futile in pre-registered emulations will subsequently fail randomised testing in at least 80% of cases, allowing trialists to redirect resources.
Rationale
Target trial emulation reproduced the results of several oncology trials when confounding was addressable; its false negatives are rarer than its false positives, which suits a triage role.
What would test it
Pre-register emulations for ten combinations with pending randomised readouts and score concordance when trials report.
Maturity
early clinical
Who has to act
data
Cost to try
Small (under $1M)
Years to first evidence
2
Bottlenecks it attacks

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