Experimental Design for In Vitro Drug Combination Studies

In vitro drug combination studies typically involve a large number of wells with various concentrations of two drugs added together. To gain the most information from an experiment, what should the drug concentrations be? Here, we consider the case where the single drug response curves are known beforehand, but no previous data is available from the combination. We consider several designs, including C- and D-optimal designs and a factorial design. We evaluate these designs based on the expected variance of the synergy score for a large set of in vitro experiments performed at Takeda Pharmaceuticals. Based on the results, we were able to identify which design was the most efficient and robust.