Across all therapeutic areas, clinical development faces well-documented, critical challenges that impact the pharmaceutical industry's ability to bring new medicines to patients – but in the oncology space, these issues are particularly acute. New strategies are urgently needed to help improve the probability of clinical trial success in oncology. In this article, we examine adaptive trial designs, recently championed as a promising approach by US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Scott Gottlieb in his confirmation testimony to the US Congress ^[1] Adaptive trial designs can help address the challenges encountered in anti-cancer clinical development today by saving time, resources and improving the odds of success.