With an increasing interest in platform designs and other innovative designs that involve multiple comparisons over multiple stages, the importance of Multi-Arm Multi-Stage ( MAMS) designs is set to rise.
The multi-arm approach evaluates a number of experimental arms against a common control within a single trial. This is combined with a ‘multi-stage’ adaptive approach which can increase efficiency by reviewing outcomes at key activity stages through interim analyses. One key historic limitation to implementing these designs has been the inherent computational challenge involved- with complexity growing with the number of arms as well as with number of stages.
An important new paper Design and Monitoring of Multi-Arm Multi-Stage Clinical Trials in the journal Biometrics, by Pranab Ghosh, Lingyun Liu, Pralay Senchaudhuri, Ping Gao and Cyrus Mehta shares ground-breaking algorithms to help compute MAMS boundaries efficiently , and so make the use of these designs practical for researchers.
The article is available to read in full via the button below.
References
Ghosh, P., Liu, L., Senchaudhuri, P., Gao, P. and Mehta, C. (2017), Design and monitoring of multi-arm multi-stage clinical trials. Biom. doi:10.1111/biom.12687
