As the End of the year approaches the Australian Pharmaceutical Biostatistics Group would like to invite you to our Annual General  Meeting and Seminar on Early stopping of clinical trials: impacts on treatment effects, meta-analyses and cost-effectiveness (details below)

Date: Monday 9 December 3-5pm  (please arrive 2.30pm for pre-meeting snacks)

Venue: George Institute, Level 5, 1 King St, Newtown 2042 – Public transport is the best option given limited parking

Please rsvp to apbgsteering@gmail.com if you will be coming to either or both meetings (AGM and seminar)

Talk: *Early stopping of clinical trials: impacts on treatment effects, meta-analyses and cost-effectiveness

This talk will address the impact of interim monitoring and early stopping on the estimation of treatment effects from clinical trials. Although many clinical trials focus on the inferential problem of testing whether a treatment is efficacious, in practice unbiased treatment effect estimation is usually just as important, particularly when cost-effectiveness is a major consideration. It has long been argued that early stopping leads to overestimation of the benefit of treatments. In fact this is only part of the story and I will discuss the range of potential effects that interim monitoring and early stopping may have, including the potential for underestimation of treatment effects. Methods to adjust for such biases in treatment effect estimation will be discussed. Various prominent guidelines, including CONSORT and GRADE, provide directions on the analysis and meta-analysis of trials with early stopping and  I will provide recommendations for interpretation of such guidelines.

Ian Marschner is Professor of Biostatistics at The University of Sydney, in the NHMRC Clinical Trials Centre. He has 30 years of experience as a biostatistician working on health and medical research, particularly involving randomised clinical trials. His research involves new methodological developments in various areas of statistical design, analysis and computation, and has been supported by NHMRC, ARC and industry funding schemes. Professor Marschner has held senior appointments in both academia and industry, including Head of the Department of Statistics at Macquarie University, Director of the Asia Biometrics Centre with the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, and Associate Professor of Biostatistics at Harvard University