Statistical implications of extrapolating the overall result to the target region in multi-regional clinical trials

The one of the principles described in ICH E9 is that only results obtained from pre-specified statistical methods in a protocol are regarded as confirmatory evidence. However, in multi-regional clinical trials, even when results obtained from pre-specified statistical methods in protocol are significant, it does not guarantee that the test treatment is approved by regional regulatory agencies. In other words, there is no so-called global approval, and each regional regulatory agency makes its own decision in the face of the same set of data from a multi-regional clinical trial. Under this situation, there are two natural methods a regional regulatory agency can use to estimate the treatment effect in a particular region. The first method is to use the overall treatment estimate, which is to extrapolate the overall result to the region of interest. The second method is to use regional treatment estimate. If the treatment effect is completely identical across all regions, it is obvious that the overall treatment estimator is more efficient than the regional treatment estimator. However, it is not possible to confirm statistically that the treatment effect is completely identical in all regions. Furthermore, some magnitude of regional differences within the range of clinical relevance may naturally exist for various reasons due to, for instance, intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Nevertheless, if the magnitude of regional differences is relatively small, a conventional method to estimate the treatment effect in the region of interest is to extrapolate the overall result to that region. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects produced by this type of extrapolation via estimations, followed by hypothesis testing of the treatment effect in the region of interest. This paper is written from the viewpoint of regional regulatory agencies.