It is a pleasure to invite you to our second LSS Presentation of 2021, to take place on May 18, from 8pm – 9:30 pm via Microsoft Teams.

The talk will be given by Prof. Stephen Senn. Stephen Senn is currently providing consulting for CCMS since he retired in April 2018 from his position of CCMS head. He joined LIH in 2011 and was previously a Professor in Statistics at the University of Glasgow (2003) and University College London (1995-2003). In addition to working as an academic he has also worked for the pharmaceutical industry in Switzerland and the National Health Service in England. He is the author of three books, Cross-over Trials in Clinical Research (1993 & 2002), Statistical Issues in Drug Development (1997, 2007) and Dicing with Death (2003). His expertise is in statistical methods for drug development and statistical inference. He consults extensively for the pharmaceutical industry.

Abstract

The response to the COVID-19 crisis by various vaccine developers has been extraordinary, both in terms of speed of response and the delivered efficacy of the vaccines. It has also raised some fascinating issues of design, analysis and interpretation. I shall consider some of these issues, taking as my example, five vaccines: Pfizer/BioNTech, AstraZeneca/Oxford, Moderna, Novavax, and J&J Janssen but concentrating mainly on the first two. Among matters covered will be concurrent control, efficient design, issues of measurement raised by two-shot vaccines and implications for roll-out, and the surprising effectiveness of simple analyses. Differences between the five development programmes as they affect statistics will be covered but some essential similarities will also be discussed.

Practical information

Date: 18 May 2021
Time: 20:00-21:30
Place: Microsoft Teams
Fee: Free
Registration: please register by sending an email to Michela Bia (michela.bia@liser.lu)