London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

The Centre for Statistical Methodology and the Tropical Epidemiology Group of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) invite you to a half day symposium on sequential trials on the afternoon of 26 September 2018. Presentations will highlight recent research and application of these methods, and speakers include Sue Todd (University of Reading), Dominic Magirr (AstraZeneca), Babak Choodari-Oskooei (MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL), and Neal Alexander (LSHTM). Attendance is free but registration is required.

Sequential designs are intended to rapidly assess new interventions, particularly when the outcome is rare, and have arguably been under-used in medical research. For example, sequential trials have been proposed as a way of ‘getting an answer sooner and cheaper’ for neglected tropical diseases. This meeting will concentrate on ‘fully sequential’ trials but group sequential designs will also be addressed. In the former, the data are analysed after each patient’s results become available, and the trial is stopped after a pre-specified objective is reached. Hence, the sample size is not fixed in advance. In the group-sequential approach, the sample size is determined conventionally, but the trial may be stopped at one of a small number of interim analyses.

This symposium will take place at Birkbeck College in central London. We anticipate that this will be of interest to statisticians and others involved in the design or analysis of trials, whether or not they have previous experience of sequential trials.