Adaptive Designs and Multiple Testing Procedures

8th - 9th May 2024, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Dates

Wednesday 8th May - Thursday 9th May

Location

Fredrick Douglas Centre, Newcastle upon Tyne

Newcastle is easily accessible via train (frequent trains from London and Edinburgh) and air (Newcastle airport has multiple daily flights to London Heathrow, Schiphol, and Frankfurt).

Cost and Registration

Private sector: £640 Public sector: £425 Students: £320

Registration includes lunch and refreshments over the two days and a course dinner on the evening of day 1.

To enrol, please go to the Newcastle University Webstore

Description

Adaptive designs are a way to improve the efficiency and participant benefit of clinical trials. With an adaptive design, information gathered during the trial can be used to change the design in a statistically robust way. There are many types of adaptive designs that are possible for different situations in all phases of trials. In both adaptive and non-adaptive trials, there are often multiple hypotheses being tested. Examples include trials with multiple endpoints, multiple treatment arms and when a trial tests a treatment in different patient subgroups. Adaptive trials often mean that a particular hypothesis is tested several times during the trial. This creates issues with multiple testing, for which suitable procedures are needed to ensure the appropriate error rate is controlled.

In this course we will give an overview of multiple testing issues and adaptive designs in trials. Participants will learn about a variety of new adaptive clinical trial designs, including group-sequential, multi-arm multi-stage (MAMS), sample size re-estimation, amongst others. As well as learning about how to design adaptive trials we will cover the implications of the design on the analysis and practical aspects of running the trial.

Throughout the course, real examples will be used to demonstrate the methodology. There will be a strong emphasis on learning how to use available software (in both R and Stata depending on the preference of the delegate) to implement the methodology in practice.

Tutors

Lectures

  1. Introduction to adaptive design

  2. Group-sequential designs

  3. Introduction to multiple testing in trials

  4. Advanced multiplicity correction

  5. Multi-arm multi-stage designs

  6. Master protocols

  7. Sample size re-estimation

  8. Analysis after adaptive trials

  9. Practical issues/Q&A

Lectures 1-8 each have an associated practical session.

FAQs

Q: Is the course running in person or online?

A: Currently we are only planning to run the course in person

Q: I’m not a statistician, will I benefit from the course?

A: The course is predominantly aimed at applied statisticians, but we’ve had non-statisticians do the course in the past and had feedback that they benefited from a good amount of the content! There’ll be a couple of lectures that may be more difficult but if you don’t mind some Greek letters and integral symbols, you should be okay.

Quotes from 2023 participants

“This was an expertly delivered course. It was great to try to follow the theory underpinning these approaches alongside pragmatic decisions that are required in applied work.”

“Overall, this course exceeded my expectations and left me feeling inspired and equipped with valuable knowledge and skills.”

“Very informative and well organised”

Quotes from 2022 participants

“This course was excellent, excellent materials and excellent teaching delivery.”

“The practicals were great and easy to follow”

“The course is an ideal introduction to adaptive designs and related issues in clinical trials. I would recommend anyone looking to work in the area to take it.”