Method - Analysis

Appropriate statistical analysis of trial data is key for their correct interpretation. The analysis programme develops and disseminates practical solutions to analysis challenges, principally:

• missing data on patients’ outcomes (ubiquitous, and aggravated by the current pandemic). We continue to address the challenge of how to make accessible, defensible, assumptions about missing patient outcome data, and how to correctly incorporate these in the trial’s interpretation.

• ensuring trials meet their objectives, by thinking carefully about the (i) patient population, (i) outcomes and how they will be measured, and (iii) how to take account of unplanned developments once patients are enrolled in a study (such as inability to tolerate treatment, or switching to another treatment). These issues are particularly important for the Unit’s tuberculosis and cancer trials.

• using computer simulation to effectively understand how useful proposed trials are likely to be, and in particular how resilient to a range of scenarios that may unfold as the trial progresses

• collaborating with the Alan Turing Institute to exploit recent advances in machine learning to identify subgroups of patients who may particularly benefit from certain treatments.