Improving the efficiency of trials using innovative pilot designs: the next phase in the conduct and reporting of pilot and feasibility studies

With continuously increasing costs of conducting trials, use of innovative approaches—such as pragmatic trials, registry-based randomised trials, adaptive trials, personalised medicine trials, platform trials, and basket trials—to the design and conduct of clinical trials has been advocated as one of the most promising solutions. In this editorial, we propose that the next wave of feasibility or pilot studies should focus on assessing the feasibility of trials using these designs, which we see as an imperative in order to unleash their potential to reduce trial costs and accelerate the drug development process and the search for best treatments, so that the right treatments can be delivered as soon as possible to the right patients.