  Background/Aims: The increasing expense of the drug development process has
seen interest in the use of adaptive designs (ADs) grow substantially in recent
years. Accordingly, much research has been conducted to identify potential
barriers to increasing the use of ADs in practice, and several articles have
argued that the availability of user-friendly software will be an important
step in making ADs easier to implement. Therefore, in this paper we present a
review of the current state of software availability for AD. Methods: We first
review articles from 31 journals published in 2013-17 that relate to
methodology for adaptive trials, in order to assess how often code and software
for implementing novel ADs is made available at the time of publication. We
contrast our findings against these journals' current policies on code
distribution. Secondly, we conduct additional searches of popular code
repositories, such as CRAN and GitHub, to identify further existing
user-contributed software for ADs. From this, we are able to direct interested
parties towards solutions for their problem of interest by classifying
available code by type of adaptation. Results: Only 29% of included articles
made their code available in some form. In many instances, articles published
in journals that had mandatory requirements on code provision still did not
make code available. There are several areas in which available software is
currently limited or saturated. In particular, many packages are available to
address group sequential design, but comparatively little code is present in
the public domain to determine biomarker-guided ADs. Conclusions: There is much
room for improvement in the provision of software alongside AD publications.
Additionally, whilst progress has been made, well-established software for
various types of trial adaptation remains sparsely available.
