A type of clinical trial that tests many therapies at once is being used for COVID and Alzheimer’s
A huge amount of money, skill and organizational complexity goes into testing a single new therapy in a randomized controlled trial—the “gold standard” type of study that forms the bedrock of modern medicine. Among the steps: devising a valid statistical design, determining dosages and measures of efficacy, passing ethical reviews, training collaborators in the study’s protocol, and recruiting the required number and type of patients for both the novel treatment and a control group.
Such trials are currently assessing therapies for Alzheimer’s disease; influenza; cancers of the breast, brain and pancreas; severe COVID; and more. “My view is that these trials are revolutionary and transformative,” says Steve Webb, a professor of critical care research at Monash University in Australia and a principal investigator in an APT directed at acute COVID.
The time line for getting results is also greatly accelerated. Unlike traditional studies, APTs involve frequent analyses of the accumulating data so the trial can swiftly evolve in response to interim results. What makes this possible is sophisticated Bayesian statistical analysis—a method of comparing probabilities that can require intensive computing power.