ACTT

The Adaptive COVID-19 Treatment Trial, better known to medical researchers as ACTT, has been hailed as a fast, flexible and relatively cheap way to sort through an array of drugs and provide doctors with standard treatment protocols for their patients.

Dr. Andre Kalil, ACTT’s principal investigator at the University of Nebraska, acknowledged that such shifts are a departure for most clinical researchers.

But ACTT’s design dictates that it is time to move on.

Neither his trial nor the one conducted at USC will be as large or as highly anticipated as ACTT, but they have the potential to dig deeper into how patients respond to the drugs by measuring blood chemicals or looking at more subtle indicators of improvement.

The benefit was good enough to flip ACTT’s first adaptive switch.