A novel power prior approach for borrowing historical control data in clinical trials

There has been an increased interest in borrowing information from historical control data to improve the statistical power for hypothesis testing, therefore reducing the required sample sizes in clinical trials. To account for the heterogeneity between the historical and current trials, power priors are often considered to discount the information borrowed from the historical data. However, it can be challenging to choose a fixed power prior parameter in the application. The modified power prior approach, which defines a random power parameter with initial prior to control the amount of historical information borrowed, may not directly account for heterogeneity between the trials. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to pick a power prior based on some direct measures of distributional differences between historical control data and current control data under normal assumptions. Simulations are conducted to investigate the performance of the proposed approach compared with current approaches (e.g. commensurate prior, meta-analytic-predictive, and modified power prior). The results show that the proposed power prior improves the study power while controlling the type I error within a tolerable limit when the distribution of the historical control data is similar to that of the current control data. The method is developed for both superiority and non-inferiority trials and is illustrated with an example from vaccine clinical trials.