A novel approach to augment single-arm clinical studies with real-world data.

In this paper, we develop a methodology for leveraging real-world data into single-arm clinical trial studies. In recent years, the idea of augmenting randomized clinical trials data with real-world data has emerged as a particularly attractive technique for health organizations and drug developers to accelerate the drug development process. Major regulatory authorities such as the Food and Drug Administration and European Medicines Agency have recognized the potential of utilizing real-world data and are advancing toward making regulatory decisions based on real-world evidence.

Metagenomic Geolocation Prediction Using an Adaptive Ensemble Classifier.

Microbiome samples harvested from urban environments can be informative in predicting the geographic location of unknown samples. The idea that different cities may have geographically disparate microbial signatures can be utilized to predict the geographical location based on city-specific microbiome samples. We implemented this idea first; by utilizing standard bioinformatics procedures to pre-process the raw metagenomics samples provided by the CAMDA organizers.