More ethical and more efficient clinical research: multiplex trial design

BackgroundToday’s clinical research faces challenges such as a lack of clinical equipoise between treatment arms, reluctance in randomizing for multiple treatments simultaneously, inability to address interactions and increasingly restricted resources. Furthermore, many trials are biased by extensive exclusion criteria, relatively small sample size and less appropriate outcome measures.FindingsWe propose a ‘Multiplex’ trial design that preserves clinical equipoise with a continuous and factorial trial design that will also result in more efficient use of resources. This multiplex design accommodates subtrials with appropriate choice of treatment arms within each subtrial. Clinical equipoise should increase consent rates while the factorial design is the best way to identify interactions.ConclusionThe multiplex design may evolve naturally from today’s research limitations and challenges, while principal objections seem absent. However this new design poses important infrastructural, organisational and psychological challenges that need in depth consideration.

• Publication year

  2014

• Venue

  BMC Research Notes

• Publication date

  2014-08-14

• Fields of study

  Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1186/1756-0500-7-530PMID 25125365PMCID 4141104
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• More ethical and more efficient clinical research

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