New ways of doing clinical trials in infectious disease to maximise evidence generation

Abstract: This talk will focus on different trials designs aiming to increase efficiency of answering questions in infectious diseases, with a particular focus on children and Low and Middle-income countries.  Many of these designs started with cancer trials and come from methodological work undertaken at MRC CTU at UCL. I will talk about the importance of trying to address more questions in a single trial in order to speed up making appropriate treatments and management available for children, where in general, availability of new treatments lags behind adults. Examples of trial designs addressing multiple questions, designed as platform trials or using multi-arm multi-stage designs will be discussed. In addition the importance of nested sub-studies within large ‘program’ trials will be discussed, including economic sub-studies, in order to inform dissemination and implementation  to policy makers as well as future research directions.