Inside the First FDA-Approved Bayesian Analysis
What REBYOTA teaches us about dynamic borrowing
What REBYOTA teaches us about dynamic borrowing
The FDA just gave us 25 pages on Bayesian inference in pivotal trials. The philosophical message is clear: Bayesian methods are welcome. Informative priors, borrowing from external data, direct interpretation of posterior probabilities were all explicitly endorsed. The operational message is different: pre-specify everything. Bayesian methods promise learning. Regulators demand
I’ve been in meetings where “adaptive” was treated as a synonym for “smaller trial.” The assumption goes like this: if we can learn as we go, we can stop early when something works, drop arms that fail, and route patients to better treatments. Surely that means fewer patients overall.