Evidence-appraisal glossary
Platform trial
A trial that evaluates several treatments against a shared common control under one master protocol, with treatments allowed to enter or leave over time as evidence accumulates.
Also called: master protocol trial.
By keeping a standing structure and a single shared control group, platform trials test many therapies more efficiently than running separate trials, and they often use adaptive rules to drop treatments that are not working or add promising new ones. This makes them well suited to fast-moving questions and to diseases where many candidates need screening. The design is statistically and logistically complex: sharing a control across treatments that entered at different times requires careful analysis to keep comparisons fair.
This is a plain-language methodology definition for reading research. It is general education, not medical advice.