Drug Supply Chain Optimization for Adaptive Clinical Trials

Abstract

With increasing interest in adaptive clinical trial designs, challenges are present to drug supply chain management which may offset the benefit of adaptive designs. Thus, it is necessary to develop an optimization tool to facilitate the decision making and analysis of drug supply chain planning. The challenges include the uncertainty of maximum drug supply needed, the shifting of supply requirement, and rapid availability of new supply at decision points. In this paper, statistical simulations are designed to optimize the pre-study medication supply strategy and monitor ongoing drug supply using real-time data collected with the progress of study. Particle swarm algorithm is applied when performing optimization, where feature extraction is implemented to reduce dimensionality and save computational cost.