Hotline sessions presented at the American College of Cardiology Congress 2009

Hotline update of clinical trials and registries presented at the American College of Cardiology Congress 2011

This article provides information and commentaries on trials which were presented at the Hotline and Clinical Trial Update Sessions during the Late Breaking Clinical Trial Sessions at the 60th annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology in New Orleans, USA, from 2nd April to 5th April 2011. This article gives an overview on a number of novel clinical trials in the field of cardiovascular medicine, which were presented. The comprehensive summaries have been generated from the oral presentation and the webcasts of the American College of Cardiology, similar as previously reported (Gensch et al. Clin Res Cardiol 100:1-9, 2011; Lenski et al. Clin Res Cardiol 99:679-692, 2010) and should provide the readers with the most comprehensive information of relevant publications. The data were presented by leading experts in the field with relevant positions in the trials.

Progress and prospects: hurdles to cardiovascular gene therapy clinical trials

Several gene therapy approaches have been designed for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. A positive finding is that the safety of cardiovascular gene therapy has been excellent even in long-term follow-up. However, several hurdles to this field are still present. A major disappointing feature of the trials is that while preclinical and uncontrolled phase-I gene therapy trials have been positive, none of the randomized controlled phase-II/III cardiovascular gene therapy trials have shown clinically relevant positive effects. Low gene transfer efficiency seems to be associated with several trials. A sophisticated efficient delivery method for cardiovascular applications is still lacking and only low concentrations of the gene product are produced in the target tissues. Only a few gene therapy vectors can be produced in large scale. In addition, inflammatory reactions against vectors and inability to regulate gene expression are still present. Furthermore, a strong placebo effect is affecting the results in gene therapy trials, and long-term trials have become more difficult to conduct because of the multiplicity of therapies applied simultaneously on the patients. This review summarizes advances and obstacles of current cardiovascular clinical gene therapy trials.

Permutation criteria to evaluate multiple clinical endpoints in a proof-of-concept study: lessons from Pre-RELAX-AHF

Background

Clinically relevant endpoints cannot be routinely targeted with reasonable power in a small study. Hence, proof-of-concept studies are often powered to a primary surrogate endpoint. However, in acute heart failure (AHF) effects on surrogates have not translated into clinical benefit in confirmatory studies. Although observing an effect on one of many endpoints due to chance is likely, observing concurrent positive trends across several outcomes by chance is usually unlikely.

Methods

Pre-RELAX-AHF, which compared 4 relaxin doses with placebo in AHF, has shown favourable trends versus placebo (one-sided P < 0.10) on six of nine clinical endpoints in the 30 μg/kg/day group. To illustrate evaluation of multiple, correlated clinical endpoints for evidence of efficacy and for dose selection, a permutation method was applied retrospectively. By randomly re-assigning the treatment group to the actual data for each of the 229 subjects, 20,000 permutation samples were constructed.

Results

The permutation P value for at least six favourable trends among nine endpoints in any dose groups was 0.0073 (99.9% CI 0.0053–0.0093). This is higher than would be expected if the endpoints were uncorrelated (0.00026), but much lower than the probability of observing one of nine comparisons significant at the traditional two-sided P < 0.05 (0.74). Thus, the result was unlikely due to correlated endpoints or to chance.

Conclusions

Examining consistency of effect across multiple clinical endpoints in a proof-of-concept study may identify efficacious therapies and enable dose selection for confirmatory trials. The merit of the approach described requires confirmation through prospective application in designing future studies.

Hotline update of clinical trials and registries presented at the American College of Cardiology Congress 2010: ACCORD, INVEST, NAVIGATOR, RACE II, SORT OUT III, CSP-474, DOSE, ASPIRE and more

This article gives an overview on a number of novel clinical trials in the field of cardiovascular medicine, which were presented during the Late Breaking Clinical Trial Sessions at the 59th annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology in Atlanta, USA, from 14th March to 16th March 2010. The data were presented by leading experts in the field with relevant positions in the trials. These comprehensive summaries should provide the readers with the most recent data on diagnostic and therapeutic developments in cardiovascular medicine similar as previously reported (Schirmer SH, van der Laan AM, Bohm M, Mahfoud F in Clin Res Cardiol 98:691-699, 2009; Maier LS, Schirmer SH, Walenta K, Jacobshagen C, Bohm M in Clin Res Cardiol 98:413-419, 2009).

Hotlines and clinical trial updates presented at the German Cardiac Society Meeting 2010: FAIR-HF, CIPAMI, LIPSIA-NSTEMI, Handheld-BNP, PEPCAD III, remote ischaemic conditioning, CERTIFY, PreSCD-II, German Myocardial Infarction Registry, DiaRegis

This article summarizes the results of a number of clinical trials and registries in the field of cardiovascular medicine which were presented during the Hotline Sessions at the annual meeting of the German Cardiac Society, held in Mannheim, Germany, from 8th to 10th April 2010. The data were presented by leading experts in the field with relevant positions in the trials. It is important to note that unpublished reports should be considered as preliminary data, as the analysis may change in the final publications. The comprehensive summaries have been generated from the oral presentation and should provide the readers with the most comprehensive information on diagnostic and therapeutic development in cardiovascular medicine similar as previously reported (Maier et al. in Clin Res Cardiol 98:345-352, 2009; 98:413-419, 2009).