Dose-Escalation Design (Continual Reassessment Method)

Dose-Escalation Design, formalized as the Continual Reassessment Method (CRM), is a Bayesian adaptive algorithm for identifying the Maximum Tolerated Dose (MTD) in Phase I clinical trials. Introduced by John O'Quigley, Margaret Pepe, and Lloyd Fisher in 1990, CRM treats dose-toxicity response as a parametric curve, updates a prior probability model after each patient's outcome, and assigns subsequent patients to the dose currently estimated closest to a pre-specified target toxicity probability.