Including non-concurrent control patients in the analysis of platform trials: is it worth it?

摘要

The implementation of innovative trial designs for drug development programmes has increased in recent years [1]. A platform trial is one such innovative design that helps improve efficiency. It has a multi-arm multi-stage design where a single control group is utilized to evaluate multiple experimental treatments for a single disease. Apart from the feature of dropping arms, a platform trial allows adding arms when new experimental treatments become available. This adds efficiency as adding arms takes less time and has a lower cost than setting up new trials from scratch.