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Why aren't participants randomized to doses in Phase I clinical trials? 

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Open accessJournal ArticleDOI
David J. Stewart, Razelle Kurzrock 
16 Apr 2013-BMC Cancer
43 Citations
Conversely, new approaches are needed to guide development of drug combinations since both standard phase II approaches and phase II-III randomized trials have a high risk of misleading. SummaryTraditional randomized clinical trials approaches are often inefficient, wasteful, and unreliable.
It is suggested that although the usual methods for choosing starting doses and dose-escalation schemes for phase I studies are safe, they are overly conservative and delay opportunities for therapeutic benefit in phase I and subsequent phase II trials.
Acute care randomized clinical trials are more vulnerable to premature discontinuation than nonacute care randomized clinical trials and have an approximately four-fold higher risk of discontinuation due to slow recruitment.
Participants in phase I clinical trial have high expectations regarding the success of experimental therapy and discount potential toxicity.
This may help improving the ability of phase I trials of targeted agents to predict doses that will eventually be registered—as this ability has been reported to be poorer for targeted agents than for phase I trials evaluating conventional cytotoxic chemotherapies [8].
However, the lack of reproducibility is more likely due to small sample sizes for phase I trials and differences between patients enrolled on phase I trials and those enrolled on phase II and II trials.
Randomized clinical trials would gain from incorporating a concern for timing as well as dosing in all three stages of clinical trials (Phase I, II and III focusing on toxicity, efficacy and a comparison with the current best treatment, respectively) and could be cost-effectively preceded by 'Phase 0' trials so as to detect, sooner and with smaller sample sizes, desired or undesired effects that may otherwise be missed.
This may be feasible when trial participants are in a controlled environment such as in early phase clinical trials, however it becomes problematic in trials where patients are in an out-patient clinic setting such as in late phase drug development.
Randomized phase II clinical trials can be an efficient means of evaluating several potential new treatments prior to a comparative phase III clinical trial.
Randomized phase II/III trials use an adaptive trial design that combines these two types of trials in one, with potential gains in time and reduced numbers of patients required to be treated.

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