The East Horizon™ platform is a culmination of Cytel’s long history of providing statistical solutions and consulting services for the pharmaceutical sector. Known for products like East®, which has long been the gold standard in adaptive clinical trial design, Cytel has expanded its capabilities with this modern, comprehensive platform that brings cutting-edge methodologies to the fingertips of researchers and pharmaceutical companies. The launch of the East Horizon platform represents the next chapter in Cytel’s evolution.
“The East Horizon platform brings together all of the innovation that we’ve developed within the space of clinical trial design over the years into a singular platform,” explains Kevin Trimm, chief product officer. This new platform integrates advanced technologies and methodologies into a single, userfriendly platform, positioning itself as the next-generation clinical trial design software. By consolidating multiple tools into one cloud-native platform, it offers a seamless workflow that helps pharmaceutical companies design more optimal trials, increasing the chances of success in clinical development. “That’s the biggest implication of the platform – promoting the adoption and use of these advanced methodologies and designing trials that ultimately result in medicines getting to market much faster.”
Simulate multiple outcomes
The East Horizon platform offers a significant advantage by enabling pharmaceutical companies to select the optimal clinical trial design for their needs through Explore, one of the tools within the platform. “Explore’s innovation lies in its ability to enable users to simultaneously evaluate multiple designs under multiple operational scenarios on a large scale,” adds Trimm. Unlike traditional methods, where trial designers would simulate one design at a time based on a limited set of assumptions, the East Horizon platform lets users simultaneously evaluate a wide range of design scenarios.
For instance, a clinical trial team can now simulate how a drug might perform under different patient response scenarios, varied patient enrolment rates, or in different geographical regions. The East Horizon platform’s powerful simulation capabilities enable users to generate tens of thousands of potential trial models, allowing them to identify the best trial design based on factors such as statistical power, duration, and cost.
“The East Horizon platform gives a huge boost to productivity because now [clinical trial teams] can view the entire design space at a glance and use the tools within the platform to quickly identify the most optimal design that either reduces the trial duration, saves costs, or improves other aspects of trial design,” says Aniruddha Deshmukh, VP of Software Engineering. By offering a broad range of potential designs, the East Horizon platform minimises the guesswork that typically accompanies trial planning. It provides a more robust, data-driven approach to decision-making, ultimately helping pharmaceutical companies choose the most promising design with greater certainty.
One of the most exciting features of the East Horizon platform is its focus on adaptive trial designs, a cutting-edge methodology that allows clinical trials to adjust dynamically as data is collected. Adaptive trials are becoming increasingly popular because they offer the ability to make real-time decisions on whether to continue, modify, or terminate a trial based on interim data.
Historically, the industry has been hesitant to implement adaptive trial designs due to their sophisticated statistical methods and the perceived challenges of implementing them in practice. “Cytel’s mission is to promote the adoption of these advanced, cutting-edge methodologies in clinical trial design,” says Trimm. The platform enables quicker decision-making, allowing pharmaceutical companies to identify drugs that show promise early on and focus resources on them, while simultaneously halting development for those that don’t meet efficacy or safety standards.
The benefits of adaptive trials are clear: accelerate drug development, improve patient outcomes, and provide more cost-effective solutions for pharmaceutical companies. The East Horizon platform’s adoption of adaptive trial designs is expected to play a pivotal role in accelerating the overall drug development timelines.
Open-source embrace: R programming integration
As part of its commitment to flexibility and innovation, Cytel has embraced opensource tools, particularly R programming, to expand the East Horizon platform’s capabilities. R is a powerful statistical programming language that is widely used in the industry, and its integration into the East Horizon platform is a major advantage for users who want to customize their trial designs.
The East Horizon platform users can augment its built-in statistical methods by writing their own R scripts, thanks to the platform’s R integration feature. “We don’t want to limit our customers to the things that we’re prioritizing, so we provide the option to use R programming within the software by simply writing an R script,” explains Trimm. Cytel has made it easy for users to access a library of pre-built R script templates through a package called CyneRgy, enabling even non-programmers to quickly adapt the platform to their specific needs.
Moreover, Cytel is taking it a step further by introducing an R coding assistant in December 2024. This tool will assist users in writing R code by responding to natural language prompts. This feature makes the power of R accessible to a broader audience, reducing the barriers to customization without requiring users to have advanced programming skills.
Looking ahead, Cytel plans to allow users to create de-novo custom trial designs using R, explains Trimm, without being limited to the predefined design options in the platform. This will further enhance the flexibility and power of the East Horizon platform, making it an indispensable software for the pharmaceutical industry.
Building trust through security and quality
Given the critical nature of clinical trial data, ensuring data integrity, security, and quality is paramount for Cytel in developing the East Horizon platform, explains Deshmukh. The platform is built on Microsoft Azure, a robust cloud infrastructure known for its high security standards. “Security is a combination of people, processes, and technology,” he continues. Cytel’s engineers undergo rigorous security training, including secure coding practices, static application security testing (SAST), and dynamic application and security testing (DAST).
Additionally, Cytel’s development process adheres to strict quality controls. The company uses an agile, incremental approach to software development, with extensive unit testing, peer reviews, and automated testing to ensure that each version of the East Horizon platform meets the highest standards. To address the complexity of statistical algorithms involved in clinical trial design, Cytel also employs expert statisticians who conduct user acceptance testing, ensuring that the platform performs reliably and accurately. “The quality of our products is very high and the rate of production incidents that we see recorded by our customers is among the lowest in the industry,” adds Deshmukh.
Revolutionising clinical trial design
The East Horizon platform is designed to meet the evolving needs of the pharmaceutical industry, aligning with current trends such as the increasing use of adaptive trial designs and the growing demand for opensource tools. Its flexibility, ease of use, and powerful simulation capabilities make it an attractive solution for pharmaceutical companies seeking to optimise their clinical trial processes.
Looking to the future, Cytel is committed to continuously improving the East Horizon platform. The company has already outlined plans for two exciting upcoming modules: Predict and Decide. Predict will focus on interim monitoring analysis and event prediction, allowing clinical teams to make data-driven decisions about a trial’s progression before its completion. Decide will help teams make go/no-go decisions at the end of a trial, enabling informed decisions about whether to move forward to the next phase of development.
“These are two very exciting developments that will be coming in the near future within the East Horizon platform,” adds Trimm. These new features will further extend the platform’s capabilities, making it an even more powerful tool for the design and management of clinical trials.
Cytel’s expectations for the East Horizon platform are high. It is expected to revolutionize clinical trial design by making advanced methodologies, like adaptive trial designs, more accessible to a broader audience. With the East Horizon platform, Cytel is setting the stage for a new era in pharmaceutical research and development.
