Adapting Pharmacological Dose-Finding Designs for Early Phase Behavioral Intervention Development Research

The use of systematic dose-finding designs to develop behavioral health interventions is lacking. In contrast, drug development research consistently follows a prescribed, regulated, and iterative pathway that begins with empirically establishing optimal drug dose. Adapting dose-finding methodologies from the drug development literature offers several advantages to increasing the feasibility, efficiency, and rigor of this important intervention refining step for behavioral intervention development. This article discusses the current state of the science for dose finding within the behavioral intervention development literature. A detailed overview of one drug development dose-finding methodology (the Accelerated Biased Coin Up-and-Down design) is then presented, using our work to adapt the Prevention Plus Intervention for treatment of pediatric obesity for mHealth delivery as an example of how this design can be applied to empirically derive the dose for a behavioral intervention.