Advances in designs for Alzheimer’s disease clinical trials

There is an urgent need to identify new treatments for the rapidly growing population of people with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Innovations in clinical trial designs many help to reduce development time, provide more definitive answers regarding drug efficacy, and facilitate prioritizing compounds to be advanced to Phase III clinical trials. Standard designs compare drug and placebo changes from baseline on a rating scale. Baysian adaptive clinical trials allow the use of data collected in the trial to modify doses, sample size, trial duration, and entry criteria in an ongoing way as the data are collected. Disease-modification is supported by findings on staggered start and delayed withdrawal designs. Futility designs can use historical controls and may shorten trial duration. Combination therapy designs may allow investigation of additive or synergistic treatment effects. Novel trial selection criteria allow investigation of treatment effects in asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic, prodromal AD populations. The Clinical Dementia Rating-Sum of Boxes (CDR-SOB) can be considered as a single trial outcome in early disease populations. Alternate forms of the Alzheimer’s Disease Assessment Scale-Cognitive Portion (ADAS-cog), computerized measures, and pharmacoeconomic scales provide new and relevant information on drug effects. Comparative dose strategies are used in trials of symptomatic agents, and novel methods including withdrawal designs, symptom emergence analyses, and sequential designs are being utilized to assess the efficacy of putative psychotropic agents. The choice of trial design is driven by the question to be answered by the clinical trial; an increasing number of design approaches are available and may be useful in accelerating and refining AD drug development.