12th Annual Meeting DIA Japan 2015

“Network meta-analysis” has attracted much attention as a new effective approach in drug development. In this session, we would like to show you how effective network meta-analysis is for statisticians and non-statisticians by looking at several examples. Network meta-analysis is the methodology of generalizing the meta-analysis of the comparison between two drugs. It can provide the following effective information by combining the study results with more than two drugs (e.g. Drug A vs Drug B, Drug B vs Drug C, Drug A vs Drug C). (i) In-direct pairwise comparison of two drugs; even if no direct comparison results available. (ii) Higher precision of treatment difference between two drugs; by combining all of the study results of direct and indirect pairwise comparison. The results from the network meta-analysis can be widely used when comparing new drug in development with a standard drug or determining margin of non-inferiority or biosimilar studies.