The aim of this book is to equip biostatisticians and other quantitative scientists with the necessary skills, knowledge, and habits to collaborate effectively with clinicians in the healthcare field. The book provides valuable insight on where to look for information and material on sample size and statistical techniques commonly used in clinical research, and on how best to communicate with clinicians. It also covers the best practices to adopt in terms of project, time, and data management; relationship with collaborators; etc.
The aim of this book is to equip biostatisticians and other quantitative scientists with the necessary skills, knowledge, and habits to collaborate effectively with clinicians in the healthcare field. The book provides valuable insight on where to look for information and material on sample size and statistical techniques commonly used in clinical research, and on how best to communicate with clinicians. It also covers the best practices to adopt in terms of project, time, and data management; relationship with collaborators; etc.
Mathematical and Statistical Skills in the Biopharmaceutical Industry: A Pragmatic Approach describes a philosophy of efficient problem solving showcased using examples pertinent to the biostatistics function in clinical drug development. It was written to share a quintessence of the authors’ experiences acquired during many years of relevant work in the biopharmaceutical industry. The book will be useful will be useful for biopharmaceutical industry statisticians at different seniority levels and for graduate students who consider a biostatistics-related career in this industry. Features: Describes a system of principles for pragmatic problem solving in clinical drug development. Discusses differences in the work of a biostatistician in small pharma and big pharma. Explains the importance/relevance of statistical programming and data management for biostatistics and necessity for integration on various levels. Describes some useful statistical background that can be capitalized upon in the drug development enterprise. Explains some hot topics and current trends in biostatistics in simple, non-technical terms. Discusses incompleteness of any system of standard operating procedures, rules and regulations. Provides a classification of scoring systems and proposes a novel approach for evaluation of the safety outcome for a completed randomized clinical trial. Presents applications of the problem solving philosophy in a highly problematic transfusion field where many investigational compounds have failed. Discusses realistic planning of open-ended projects.
Encyclopedic in breadth, yet practical and concise, Medical Biostatistics, Fourth Edition focuses on the statistical aspects ofmedicine with a medical perspective, showing the utility of biostatistics as a tool to manage many medical uncertainties. This edition includes more topics in order to fill gaps in the previous edition. Various topics have been enlarged and modified as per the new understanding of the subject.
The premise of Quality by Design (QbD) is that the quality of the pharmaceutical product should be based upon a thorough understanding of both the product and the manufacturing process. This state-of-the-art book provides a single source of information on emerging statistical approaches to QbD and risk-based pharmaceutical development. A comprehensive resource, it combines in-depth explanations of advanced statistical methods with real-life case studies that illustrate practical applications of these methods in QbD implementation.
With ever-rising healthcare costs, evidence generation through Health Economics and Outcomes Research (HEOR) plays an increasingly important role in decision-making about the allocation of resources. Accordingly, it is now customary for health technology assessment and reimbursement agencies to request for HEOR evidence, in addition to data from clinical trials, to inform decisions about patient access to new treatment options. While there is a great deal of literature on HEOR, there is a need for a volume that presents a coherent and unified review of the major issues that arise in application, especially from a statistical perspective. Statistical Topics in Health Economics and Outcomes Research fulfils that need by presenting an overview of the key analytical issues and best practice. Special attention is paid to key assumptions and other salient features of statistical methods customarily used in the area, and appropriate and relatively comprehensive references are made to emerging trends. The content of the book is purposefully designed to be accessible to readers with basic quantitative backgrounds, while providing an in-depth coverage of relatively complex statistical issues. The book will make a very useful reference for researchers in the pharmaceutical industry, academia, and research institutions involved with HEOR studies. The targeted readers may include statisticians, data scientists, epidemiologists, outcomes researchers, health economists, and healthcare policy and decision-makers.
Randomization, Masking, and Allocation Concealment is indispensable for any trial researcher who wants to use state of the art randomization methods, and also wants to be able to describe these methods correctly. Far too often the subtle nuances that distinguish proper randomization from flawed randomization are completely ignored in trial reports that state only that randomization was used, with no additional information. Experience has shown that in many cases, the type of randomization that was used was flawed. It is only a matter of time before medical journals and regulatory agencies come to realize that we can no longer rely on (or publish) flawed trials, and that flawed randomization in and of itself disqualifies a trial from being robust or high quality, even if that trial is of high quality otherwise. This book will help to clarify the role randomization plays in ensuring internal validity, and in drawing valid inferences from the data. The various chapters cover a variety of randomization methods, and are not limited to the most common (and most flawed) ones. Readers will come away with a profound understanding of what constitutes a valid randomization procedure, so that they can distinguish the valid from the flawed among not only existing methods but also methods yet to be developed.
Cluster Randomised Trials, Second Edition discusses the design, conduct, and analysis of trials that randomise groups of individuals to different treatments. It explores the advantages of cluster randomisation, with special attention given to evaluating the effects of interventions against infectious diseases. Avoiding unnecessary mathematical detail, the book covers basic concepts underlying the use of cluster randomisation, such as direct, indirect, and total effects. In the time since the publication of the first edition, the use of cluster randomised trials (CRTs) has increased substantially, which is reflected in the updates to this edition. There are greatly expanded sections on randomisation, sample size estimation, and alternative designs, including new material on stepped wedge designs. There is a new section on handling ordinal outcome data, and an appendix with descriptions and/or generating code of the example data sets. Although the book mainly focuses on medical and public health applications, it shows that the rigorous evidence of intervention effects provided by CRTs has the potential to inform public policy in a wide range of other areas. The book encourages readers to apply the methods to their own trials, reproduce the analyses presented, and explore alternative approaches.
Quantitative Methods in HIV/AIDS Research provides a comprehensive discussion of modern statistical approaches for the analysis of HIV/AIDS data. The first section focuses on statistical issues in clinical trials and epidemiology that are unique to or particularly challenging in HIV/AIDS research; the second section focuses on the analysis of laboratory data used for immune monitoring, biomarker discovery and vaccine development; the final section focuses on statistical issues in the mathematical modeling of HIV/AIDS pathogenesis, treatment and epidemiology. This book brings together a broad perspective of new quantitative methods in HIV/AIDS research, contributed by statisticians and mathematicians immersed in HIV research, many of whom are current or previous leaders of CFAR quantitative cores. It is the editors’ hope that the work will inspire more statisticians, mathematicians and computer scientists to collaborate and contribute to the interdisciplinary challenges of understanding and addressing the AIDS pandemic.
