Adaptive biased-coin designs for skewing the allocation proportion in clinical trials with normal responses.

Response adaptive designs are used in phase III clinical trial for skewing the allocation pattern towards the better treatments. We use optimum design theory to derive adaptive designs when the responses are normally distributed. The performance of the designs is studied with respect to the loss and the proportion of allocation to different treatments. The adaptive design does not affect inference. Copyright 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd