Opinion on Adaptive Designs in Clinical Trials

Starting from a couple of research papers in this type published in Europe’s peer-reviewed statistical journals, adaptive designs have made much progress in the development and implementation in the past 20 years, which are anticipated to increase the information value of clinical trial data in order to enable better decisions during the course and speed up the development process in the context of fierce competition and limited trial budgets. 

So far for now, main types of adaptive deigns are: 1) adaptive randomization which allows changing randomization probabilities using information from past treatment assignment (such as the biased coin design), or covariate-adaptive, or response-adaptive or covariate-adjusted-adaptive; 2) adaptive dose response designs; 3) sample size re-estimation; 4) Treatment selection designs; 5) group sequential designs. All areas in this topic are undergone active development because analytic derivations are not well investigated for many methods.