The methodology team at the MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL is a key partner of Penta and has made a huge contribution to our studies on HIV. The team recently published a paper in Sage Journals describing how the advantages of two designs can be practically combined:
The combined design allows testing of multiple primary research hypotheses, which should lead to faster decisions about experimental treatments.
The main features of the combined design are
The paper discusses analysis and conduct considerations in this new setting, including:
It also shows some ways to display the evolution of a factorial-MAMS trial over time (see Figure below).
The paper is authored by Ian R White, Babak Choodari-Oskooei, Matthew R Sydes, Brennan C Kahan, Leanne McCabe, Anna Turkova, Hanif Esmail, Diana M Gibb, Deborah Ford. Combining factorial and multi-arm multi-stage platform designs to evaluate multiple interventions efficiently. Clinical Trials. May 2022. doi:10.1177/17407745221093577
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