Basket trial
A clinical trial design that tests a single therapy across multiple diseases or tumor types that share a common molecular feature or biomarker, rather than a single diagnosis. It accelerates evaluation of targeted treatments in precision medicine.
What is a basket trial?
A basket trial is a clinical study design that evaluates a single therapy across several different diseases or tumor types that share a common molecular feature, such as a specific gene mutation or biomarker, rather than grouping patients by their diagnosis. The shared target, not the organ or disease label, defines who enrolls.
This approach reflects precision-medicine thinking, where a treatment is matched to an underlying biological driver. Each disease or tumor type forms its own arm, or basket, within the overall trial.
Why is the basket trial design important?
Basket trials let researchers assess a targeted therapy efficiently across multiple conditions at once, which can accelerate evidence generation for treatments aimed at uncommon molecular alterations. This is especially valuable when any single disease subset is too small to study quickly on its own.
Because it concentrates on a biomarker-defined population, the design can support faster signals of benefit and inform regulatory and clinical decisions in oncology and beyond. It has become a recognized tool in the development of precision and targeted therapies.
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