20th - 21st March 2025, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Thursday 20th March - Friday 21st March
King George VI Building, 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).
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.
Registration is open on the University’s storefront page. Payment can be made with credit/debit card or via invoice.
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.
Introduction to adaptive design
Group-sequential designs
Introduction to multiple testing in trials
Advanced multiplicity correction
Multi-arm multi-stage designs 1
Multi-arm multi-stage designs 2
Analysis after adaptive trials
Sample size re-estimation
Platform trials and practical issues
Lectures 1-8 each have an associated practical session.
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.
“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”
“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.”