Risk assessment tools for survival prognosis: An era of new surrogacy endpoints for clinical outcome measurement in pulmonary arterial hypertension clinical trials?

Abstract

Developing a new medication in a rare disease indication like pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) is very challenging. This is especially true now that clinical trials often employ time to clinical worsening (TTCW) as an endpoint (thus requiring a relatively large and lengthy trial) and since patients are more frequently prescribed combination therapy. During the last few decades, several tools have been developed to predict mortality in PAH and have demonstrated generally good discrimination. The objective of this review article is to assess the available data on the different tools and methods described in the literature and identify potential candidates that could be used as surrogate endpoints in pivotal randomized clinical trials in future. Some of these tools have been validated in various registries and in post-hoc analyses of clinical trial data, but none have been assessed in a prospective clinical trial and we still lack the evidence necessary for endorsement by health authorities. In this review, we identify several promising options that warrant further investigation as potential surrogate endpoints in clinical trials to replace TTCW or 6-minute walk distance. Prospective inclusion of such tools in new clinical trials may help build a stronger surrogacy for prognosis of disease progression and mortality.

Keywords: Clinical endpoint; PAH; Risk score; Surrogate marker; Survival prediction.