I had an occasion to deep dive into hundreds of clinical trials about a year ago, talk to PIs and trial participants, etc. One thing I didn't even have awareness of, let alone appreciation for, was how essential it is to have a good trial design (or maybe how an insufficiently considered trial design can be vulnerable to catastrophic failure modes).
It seems that running these 'small batch' studies/trials can be tremendously helpful to inform and refine the approach before executing on a larger scale. Of course if it takes 3 years to reach an endpoint it probably doesn't make sense to serialize them, but to my layman perspective there appears to be clear value (and in this case encouraging results).
It seems that running these 'small batch' studies/trials can be tremendously helpful to inform and refine the approach before executing on a larger scale. Of course if it takes 3 years to reach an endpoint it probably doesn't make sense to serialize them, but to my layman perspective there appears to be clear value (and in this case encouraging results).