Novel Trial Designs for Old Problems

We are delighted to host Professor Sarah Walker who will be talking on the topic of ‘Novel trial designs for old problems’.

Everyone is excited about new ideas for clinical trial design to make them more efficient. Randomised trials provide the most robust evidence about new interventions, as they control for both known and unknown confounders. Over the last 50 years, huge progress has been made in healthcare by improving a “standard-of-care” regimen through a series of generally two-arm, randomised controlled trials which tightly control the Type I error (false-positive rate, or the chance of incorrectly saying that a new regimen is better than standard-of-care). Over the last decade, “platform” trial designs, comparing multiple new interventions versus this “standard-of-care”, have accelerated the delivery of effective new interventions. Despite this progress, and the huge threats of antimicrobial resistance to the delivery of safe healthcare, advances in antibiotic treatment have been very limited. In this interactive webinar, Professor Sarah Walker presents a series of novel trial design examples that address some of the relevant limitations of current trial designs to antibiotic trials and highlights the need for more innovative approaches to address the unique problems posed by bacterial infections.

Event date
May 19 2023

Chair
• Professor Di Gibb - Professor of Epidemiology, MRC Clinical Trials Unit at University College London, UK

Speakers
• Kate Sturgeon - Senior Research Nurse and Capacity Strengthening Coordinator, MRC Clinical Trials Unit at University College London, UK
• Professor Sarah Walker - Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology, MRC Clinical Trials Unit at University College London and at the Nuffield Department of Medicine at Oxford University

Agenda
0:00 - Welcome
4:14 - Demonstrate MRC Clinical Trials Unit Capacity Strengthening Hub
10:37 - ‘Novel trial designs for old problems'
43:39 - Q&A