Adaptive trial design: could we use this approach to improve clinical trials in the field of global health?
We need more clinical trials in the world's poorest regions to evaluate new drugs and vaccines, and also to find better ways to manage health issues. Clinical trials are expensive, time consuming, and cumbersome. However, in wealthier regions these limiting factors are being addressed to make trials less administrative and improve the designs. A good example is adaptive trial design. This innovation is becoming accepted by the regulators and has been taken up by the pharmaceutical industry to reduce product development times and costs. If this approach makes trials easier and less expensive surely we should be implementing this approach in the field of tropical medicine and international health? As yet this has rarely been proposed and there are few examples. There is a need for raising the awareness of these design approaches because they could be used to make dramatic improvements to clinical research in developing countries.