What Is a Basket Trial?

A basket trial is a clinical trial design that tests a single drug across multiple different cancer types at once, grouping patients by a shared molecular feature — such as a specific mutation — rather than by the organ where their cancer started.

Traditional cancer trials have historically organized patients by tumor location — a lung cancer trial, a colorectal cancer trial, and so on. Basket trials instead organize patients by a shared genomic feature, on the theory that a drug targeting a specific mutation may work similarly regardless of which organ the tumor originated in.

This design has become more common as genomic testing has revealed that specific mutations, such as certain KRAS or BRAF alterations, can appear across many different cancer types, making it more efficient to test a targeted drug across all of them simultaneously rather than running separate trials for each cancer type.

Basket trials can be particularly useful for studying uncommon mutations that might not otherwise generate enough patients within a single cancer type to support a traditional trial.