Multi-treatment optimal response-adaptive designs for phase III clinical trials

Response-adaptive designs are used in phase Ill clinical trials to allocate a larger number of patients to the better treatment. Optimal response-adaptive designs have become popular in recent days for this purpose, where the design is derived from some optimal viewpoints, mostly by optimizing some objective function subject to some constraint(s). However, most of the optimal designs are derived with two treatments and only a few works are available for several treatments. The present paper provides a generalized framework to derive multi-treatment optimal response-adaptive designs. A detailed performance study is provided for three treatment trials minimising failures. The applicability is also judged by redesigning some real clinical trials. (C) 2010 The Korean Statistical Society. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.