Platform trials—an emerging methodology for perioperative medicine: a narrative review

The traditional model for testing new treatments, before widespread usage in clinical practice, is the parallel group randomised trial. However, these are often inefficient, time-consuming and expensive, which can be barriers to the timely improvement of clinical care. This is a particular issue for anaesthesia and perioperative medicine where funding for large clinical trials is often scarce. Platform trials are an emerging methodology for testing new interventions, which offer benefits over the traditional parallel group paradigm. Platform trials have the ability to test multiple interventions at the same time, and to add or remove interventions during the course of the programme without undermining the validity or integrity of the trial findings. They are most often structured around a master protocol, which describes the core methods and research governance processes, with each intervention described in either a sub-section or appendix to the master protocol. The principal benefit to researchers and to research funders is that, unlike the sequential parallel group trial model, platform trials can use the same research infrastructure (e.g. database, standard operating procedures etc.) to answer multiple research questions, which is much more time and cost effective. The benefits of platform trials can be further enhanced with the use of adaptive designs or by sharing control patients, for example, by using a multi-arm multi-stage design. Perioperative medicine, anaesthesia and surgery are ideally placed to benefit from platform trials.