Elucidating vaccine efficacy using a correlate of protection, demographics, and logistic regression

0585224 - ÚI 2025 RIV GB eng J - Journal Article
Dudášová, J. - Valenta, Zdeněk - Sachs, J. R.
Elucidating vaccine efficacy using a correlate of protection, demographics, and logistic regression.
BMC Medical Research Methodology. Roč. 24, 30 April 2024 (2024), č. článku 101. E-ISSN 1471-2288
Institutional support: RVO:67985807
Keywords : Correlate of protection * Vaccine efficacy * Relative risk * Baseline covariates * Logistic regression
OECD category: Infectious Diseases
Impact factor: 4, year: 2022
Method of publishing: Open access
https://doi.org/10.1186/s12874-024-02197-3

BACKGROUND: Vaccine efficacy (VE) assessed in a randomized controlled clinical trial can be affected by demographic, clinical, and other subject-specific characteristics evaluated as baseline covariates. Understanding the effect of covariates on efficacy is key to decisions by vaccine developers and public health authorities. METHODS: This work evaluates the impact of including correlate of protection (CoP) data in logistic regression on its performance in identifying statistically and clinically significant covariates in settings typical for a vaccine phase 3 trial. The proposed approach uses CoP data and covariate data as predictors of clinical outcome (diseased versus non-diseased) and is compared to logistic regression (without CoP data) to relate vaccination status and covariate data to clinical outcome. RESULTS: Clinical trial simulations, in which the true relationship between CoP data and clinical outcome probability is a sigmoid function, show that use of CoP data increases the positive predictive value for detection of a covariate effect. If the true relationship is characterized by a decreasing convex function, use of CoP data does not substantially change positive or negative predictive value. In either scenario, vaccine efficacy is estimated more precisely (i.e., confidence intervals are narrower) in covariate-defined subgroups if CoP data are used, implying that using CoP data increases the ability to determine clinical significance of baseline covariate effects on efficacy. CONCLUSIONS: This study proposes and evaluates a novel approach for assessing baseline demographic covariates potentially affecting VE. Results show that the proposed approach can sensitively and specifically identify potentially important covariates and provides a method for evaluating their likely clinical significance in terms of predicted impact on vaccine efficacy. It shows further that inclusion of CoP data can enable more precise VE estimation, thus enhancing study power and/or efficiency and providing even better information to support health policy and development decisions.
Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0352993


Research data: Publisher web - Supplementary material