Adaptive biased-coin designs for clinical trials with several treatments

Adaptive designs are used in phase III clinical trials for skewing the allocation pattern towards the better treatments. We use optimum design theory to provide a skewed biased-coin procedure for sequential designs with continuous responses. The skewed designs are used to provide adaptive designs, the performance of which is studied numerically for designs with three treatments. Important properties are loss and the proportion of allocation to inferior treatments. Regularisation to provide consistent parameter estimates greatly improves both these properties.