ArticleJCO clinical cancer informatics2023
Target Trial Emulation: A Design Tool for Cancer Clinical Trials.
Article in JCO clinical cancer informatics, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 16 citations in OpenAlex.
- Target trial emulation studies in oncology: a comprehensive analysis.The oncologist · 2026Article
- From study design to executable code: automating target trial emulation with large language models.JAMIA open · 2026Article
- Completion vs. early discontinuation of chemotherapy and the impact on 5-year all-cause mortality in women treated for early-stage breast cancer from 2015 to 2020: A cohort study using a target trial emulation approach.British journal of clinical pharmacology · 2026Article
- Comparative effectiveness of CDK4/6 inhibitors in metastatic breast cancer: using the target trial emulation framework to investigate overall survival in routine care.Breast cancer research and treatment · 2026Article
- Mapping eligibility criteria in oncology target trial emulations using real-world data: a scoping review.BMC medical research methodology · 2026Article
- Design and Implementation of Observational Studies Emulating a Target Trial.JAMA network open · 2026Article
- Impact of Antihypertensive Treatment on Outcomes of Adjuvant Bevacizumab for Ovarian Cancer (IATRO), Results from a Nationwide Emulated Clinical Trial.Clinical pharmacology and therapeutics · 2026Article
- Adjusting for selection bias due to missing eligibility criteria in emulated target trials.American journal of epidemiology · 2025Article
- Real-World Data and Causal Machine Learning to Enhance Drug Development.Therapeutic innovation & regulatory science · 2025Review
- Methodologies for the Emulation of Biomarker-Guided Trials Using Observational Data: A Systematic Review.Journal of personalized medicine · 2025Review
- Neoadjuvant Radiotherapy vs Up-Front Surgery for Resectable Locally Advanced Rectal Cancer.JAMA network open · 2025Article
- Strengthening health technology assessment for cancer treatments in Europe by integrating causal inference and target trial emulation.The Lancet regional health. Europe · 2025Review
- Applying Target Trial Emulation to Evaluate Acupuncture Combined with Rehabilitation for Autism Spectrum Disorder in Children: A Retrospective Single-Center Real-World Protocol.Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment · 2025Article
- When to stop immunotherapy for advanced melanoma: the emulated target trials.EClinicalMedicine · 2024Article
- Clinical Research Informatics: a Decade-in-Review.Yearbook of medical informatics · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
purposeTo apply target trial emulation to explore the potential impact of eligibility criteria on the primary outcome of a randomized controlled trial.
methodsSimulations of a real-world explanatory trial of transarterial radioembolization for advanced unresectable hepatocellular carcinoma with portal vein invasion were performed to examine the effects of cohort specification on survival outcomes and patient sample size. Simulations comprised 24 different permutations of the trial varied on three disease nonspecific eligibility parameters. Treatment and control arms for these emulated trials were drawn from the National Cancer Database and matched by treatment propensity. Target trial emulation served as the causal framework for this analysis, allowing the architecture of a true controlled experiment to address forms of bias routinely encountered in comparative effectiveness studies involving real-world observational data.
resultsTwenty-four propensity score-matched cohorts comprising a wider clinical spectrum of patients than specified by the original target trial were successfully generated using the National Cancer Database. The arms for each of the emulated trials demonstrated exchangeability across all eligibility criteria and other clinical covariates. Significant treatment benefits were associated with only a narrow range of eligibility criteria, indicating that the original target trial was well specified.
conclusionThe impact of patient selection on treatment outcomes can be studied using target trial emulation. This analytical framework can furthermore serve to leverage existing real-world data to inform the task of cohort specification for a randomized controlled trial, facilitating a more data-driven approach for this important step in clinical trial design.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.