It takes time, a lot of recourses and substantial research to develop a new drug that is effective and serves a medical purpose. Nevertheless, it has been indicated that not always the process of researching leads to positive and productive outcomes, which becomes a major setback in the Pharmaceutical industry. In order to avoid such drawbacks that prevent the industry from quicker progress, regulators and researchers try to find more advanced ways that will lead to more adequate results. Realizing that the traditional designs of clinical trials are not efficient enough, specialists in this sector begin to implement the adaptive design in clinical trials that is recommended by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Precisely, the adaptive design clinical trials is an innovative approach that has the initial role to build a reinforced connection between researches and working new pharmaceutical products. This design offers agility and allows researchers to regulate clinical studies in the most productive way. In other words, thanks to the adaptive design, a specific trial and the direction in which it is going can be modified and adjusted in accordance to what has been indicated before that. For example, some changes may include dosage, sizes of samples and duration of the whole medicament trial. Still, it is important to note that alterations cannot be implemented at any time. Every modification has to be determined in advance while every further action should be pre-planned according to the information which has been collected before that during the study. The most commonly used adaptive designs are the group sequential design, adaptive randomization design and biomarker-adaptive design which is also known as enrichment target clinical trial design.
There are a number of advantages offered by the adaptation of adaptive design techniques in clinical studies and drug development processes. In this regard, a positive use of this type of designs will give a chance to the investigator to react more quickly and fix any incorrect assumptions which have been made at the start of the trial. Finally, adaptive design clinical trials are able to reduce the time needed for the creation of a drug and can also speed up the development processes. However, various challenges may arise when using adaptive designs and inspectors should be prepared to act appropriately.
To sum up, the Pharmaceutical and Clinical industry see the adoption of adaptive designs as a way to improve the course of action during different clinical researches and development of new products. The proper use of such designs points out aspects such as validity, quality and integrity and allows specialists involved in a study to alter and modify in order to reach optimized and better results at the end.
