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Did you know…?

… that from initial discovery in the laboratory it takes on average 12 years to make a medicine available to patients?

Healthy
To make sure that a medicine is effective at fighting disease and safe to consume, pharmaceutical companies have to spend years rigorously testing it in clinical trials. Statisticians have a very important role to play in designing these trials and analysing the data collected to obtain the evidence needed to show the medicines work.

On this site you can explore how statisticians use their mathematical skills to improve patients’ quality of life and to save lives.

Introduction to Clinical Trials

Testing a medicine in clinical trials is a very long and expensive task, requiring pharmaceutical companies, doctors, hospitals, healthy volunteers, and real patients to work together. The video below, made by the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA), gives an insight into this journey.

Clinical Trial Quick Facts

  • Usually the first people to try out a new medicine are healthy volunteers. Healthy volunteers are used to find the maximum dose the body can tolerate, then this is used in trials on patients.
  • In a ‘gold standard’ clinical trial neither the patient nor the doctor knows whether the drug being administered is the new experimental one or the control treatment. This is called double blinding.
  • Clinical trials tend to be global, enrolling patients from many countries around the world.
  • It costs over $2.5 billion in research and development costs to bring a drug to market to be prescribed to patients.

Upcoming Events

PSI ToxSIG Webinar: Beyond the looking glass - Interpreting animal welfare & behaviour by monitoring & assessing mice activity data

Analysing continuously collected locomotive activity data to interpret mice welfare and behaviour.

PSI Journal Club: Survival Analysis

Our next journal club features two papers on the topic of Survival Analysis. For each of these published papers there will be a 20 minute presentation by author followed by a 10 minute discussion.

PSI VisSIG Webinar: Rapid Insights to Data

The field of data visualization is the intersection of data journalism, statistics, graphic design, computer science, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology. We will focus on the latter two fields of data visualization as it relates to data visualization: neuroscience and cognitive psychology.

PSI One-Day Meeting: Non-proportional hazards and applications in immuno-oncology

Hear about potential strategies to handle non-proportional hazards and delayed treatment effects from experts in the field.

Latest Jobs

Biostatistician Project Leader

As a statistician in the Biostatistics and Programming Department, you will be responsible for the methodological and statistical aspects of projects in early clinical development in order to optimize the early development plan and ensure its coherence.

Director Biostatistics

By joining our company, in this role you will apply your skills and experience in support of developing scientifically based arguments aiming to provide fair accessibility to our company’s drugs and vaccines making a real difference in patient’s lives.

Director of Statistics

As a Director of Statistics, you will be accountable for guiding statisticians in their work, performing senior review of documentation and output deliveries, providing oversight and advising on best practices approach to statistics for clinical trials.