Dr. Patrick Lawler

Dr. Lawler is a cardiac critical care physician and clinician-scientist at the McGill University Health Centre. He is also an Associate Professor of Medicine at McGill University and at the University of Toronto. His research interests lie at the intersection of acute cardiovascular disorders and systemic critical illness, and employ clinical trials, clinical epidemiology, and translational methods. He has led multiple adaptive randomized clinical trials in acutely/critically ill patients, and supported the design and implementation of others. His work has been funded by CIHR, NIH, Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, and others, and has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, the European Heart Journal, Circulation, Intensive Care Medicine, and elsewhere.

About the keynote: 

Innovative designs for randomized controlled trials: Focus on adaptive platform trials

There has been recent interest in leveraging adaptive platform randomized controlled trials as tools for clinical evidence generation. These designs have been employed in oncology, but recently have gained considerable attention and much more widespread uptake following their successful implementation during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is anticipated that research ethics boards will be increasingly asked to review research involving these designs, and researchers conducting these trials need to be aware of ethical considerations relevant to their designs. Accordingly, this talk will review these trials, contrast them with conventional parallel group single intervention trials, and provide an opportunity to collectively discuss pertinent ethical considerations.