Jul 29, 2019; The Lancet. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2352-3018(19)30240-1

Abstract

HIV is one of the most studied areas of infectious diseases. However, most trials evaluating treatments have been done in predominantly first-line patients and typically use a standard two-group inefficient design. 1 Two-group designs are inefficient because they fail to share control groups and rarely consider comparisons with other leading treatments. 2 The number of trials and size of included populations drops dramatically as the disease becomes differentiated, such as second-line and third-line treatments or coinfections. 2 AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG) A5288, therefore, represents a major step forward in clinical research methods serving a rarely studied population.