IMI is pleased to announce that Dr Haiyan Zheng has been awarded a 6-year Cancer Research UK Career Development Fellowship, with a funding value of £1,320,866, to establish a dedicated research group in Bath. Career Development Fellowships support new group leaders who do not have a salaried independent position to establish their own independent research group. Haiyan’s exciting project, entitled “STEEP: Statistically Efficient Methods for Precision Medicine Trials” will commence on 1 September 2024 and aims to develop advanced statistical methods for clinical trials that involve stratified patient subgroups.
Basket trials are a well-known type of such trials, and these involve an innovative approach to precision oncology that can enrol patients across different cancer types who share common genetic profiles. Dr Zheng has developed several advanced methods for the design and analysis of basket trials using methods which significantly improve efficiency by borrowing information between patient subgroups. Pairwise similarity of the subgroup-specific treatment effects is quantified to inform the degree of borrowing. Within her STEEP project, Haiyan will investigate how basket trials, as well as relevant approaches, can be designed to allow (i) multiplicity correction, (ii) sequential decision making, given the accumulating trial data or new information from outside the trial. Specifically, Haiyan will develop statistical methods that:
- control the risk of incorrectly claiming efficacy when there is none,
- allocate more patients to receive a better-suited treatment during the trial,
- supplement the basket trial (especially for rare cancers) with historical controls or real-world evidence,
- enable adding new patient subgroups or new control treatments to an ongoing basket trial.
Dr Zheng is Senior Lecturer in Statistics at the Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Bath as well as the Theme Lead for Clinical Trial, IMI and also holds an Honorary Appointment at The Institute of Cancer Research, and a Visiting Position at the MRC Biostatistics Unit in Cambridge.