1. Dose finding for combination trials with many treatments

Team: Prof Thomas Jaki (Lancaster University), Prof Andy Grieve (Aptiv Solutions)
Clinical Advisor: Dr Gerry Davis, a senior lecturer and honorary consultant in infectious diseases at the University Liverpool. He has a particular interest in tuberculosis and is editor for the Cochrane Infectious Diseases Group.
Location: Lancaster University (Lancaster, UK)

Treatments using a combination of drugs are common in diseases such as cancer and tuberculosis (TB) and adequate identification of the optimal dose and regime is essential. In TB, e.g., 7 compounds are in preclinical development and 8 in early phase clinical development, each of which is likely being administered in combination¹.

In this project Bayesian adaptive dose-finding approaches for more than two agents will be developed and tailored for the specific needs of TB trials. Optimal dose sequential allocation strategies that use informative priors from single-agent designs will be devised. A problem here is avoiding exponential explosion of the space of drug combinations to be tested. To overcome this we will combine traditional dose-finding ideas with sequential design with multiple arms. We will also consider the impact of synergism/antagonism, and different modes of operation, between agents.

Meet our Early Stage Researcher: Pavel Mozgunov, Lancaster University

I was born and spent my childhood in a small Russian town Mtsensk. During my school studies I was mostly obsessed with Math, Physics and Economics. It gave me an incentive to continue my education in the University Higher School of Economics in Moscow. I chose Statistics and Data Analysis as my undergraduate program. During my studies I was ready to accept any challenge in Statistics Science. It allowed me to explore different research problems and  to get inspiration for my own papers.  I was working in different areas as signal processing, classification and information theory. I had become a research assistant in the Science Group of Probabilistic Methods and a member of Laboratory of Stochastic Analysis at HSE. My favourite hobby is music. It has become an essential part of my personality. I like to enrich my music library and play piano for more than 8 years. I also enjoy hiking and travelling.

Project News 1 of 10 pages

Meet the IDEAS Network partners

The IDEAS network brings together leading institutions in the training of medical statisticians, large and small sized pharmaceutical companies and is supplemented by clinical experts.