An adaptive platform study evaluates multiple intervention arms against a shared control, with arms entering or leaving the study according to pre-specified rules. Instead of running one two-arm trial after another, a platform keeps a single protocol and control group running while candidate interventions rotate through it — a design used when you expect to test several treatments over time and want each to be compared against the same concurrent control.
TrialPilot supports this design end to end: you configure the platform in the Study Builder before the study goes live, and once it is running you operate it from a dedicated runtime workspace with a blinding firewall between operational staff and the unblinded decision-makers.
Enable platform mode#
Turn on Adaptive platform study in the Study Builder when the protocol fits this design. Enabling it reveals the Platform tab, where you configure:
- Platform arms and their coded labels — the neutral labels blinded staff see in place of intervention names.
- Interventions and per-arm allocation weights.
- Control-arm status — which arm serves as the shared control.
- Domain assignments for combination designs.
- Error-control policy — how the design controls statistical error across the multiple comparisons a platform makes.
- Whether the platform is intended for an FDA submission.
- Response-adaptive randomization guardrails — limits on how far allocation can shift toward better-performing arms.
- Combination-design settings.
Platform mode locks at go-live
The platform runtime workspace#
Once the study is live, open Platform from the study navigation. The runtime workspace is split into four areas, each scoped to a different role in the platform's governance:
| Area | What it does |
|---|---|
| Manage | Maintain platform configuration and decisions over the life of the study. |
| DSMB / statistician console | Receive firewalled decisions from the Data and Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) and the unblinded statistician workflow. |
| Arm status (blinded) | View operational arm status without unblinding — arms appear under their coded labels. |
| Audit | Review the record of platform activity. |
The split matters because a platform study runs with a blinding firewall: the people who see unblinded interim results (the DSMB and unblinded statistician) are deliberately separated from the people operating the study day to day. Who sees which console is governed by study-team roles — see Roles and permissions.
How arm decisions are governed#
TrialPilot does not decide when an arm should open, graduate, or stop. The platform executes decisions that have already been made by the appropriate unblinded governance process — the DSMB or unblinded statistician workflow defined for the study. When a decision arrives, the platform:
- Validates the decision against the locked pre-specified rule.
- Snapshots it, so the state the decision was made against is preserved.
- Rolls it out atomically — allocation changes take effect as a single consistent transition, never a partial one.
This keeps the adaptive part of the design auditable: every change to the platform traces back to a governed decision, validated against rules that were fixed before the study went live.
Related#
Platform mode is one of two randomization paths in TrialPilot. For ordinary randomized controlled, crossover, or factorial designs — with blocked or minimization-based allocation and emergency unblinding — see Randomization and blinding. For how blinded and unblinded roles are assigned across the study team, see Roles and permissions.