The Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics is celebrating the successful completion of the 2023 Duke-Industry Statistics Symposium (DISS2023). The three-day virtual event was held March 29-31 with the theme “Empowering Clinical Development by Harnessing Data from Diverse Sources.” More than 300 people attended the symposium, which featured short courses, two keynote speakers, 12 parallel sessions, and 2 parallel poster lightning talk sessions where 26 posters were presented. Xiaofei Wang, PhD, and Shein-Chung Chow, PhD, co-chaired the organizing committee.
The symposium brought researchers from academic and the pharmaceutical industry together and helped facilitate conversations and share knowledge. “We as statisticians, are trying to develop valid statistical methods that people can use,” said organizing committee member Hwanhee Hong, PhD. “The industry experts can then use those methods, tweak it, and adapt it to their own data applications.”
Day one of the symposium offered short courses focused on Bayesian methods in clinical trial design, real-world evidence, biosimilars analysis, and multi-regional trials.
On day two, John Concato, MD, FACP, associate director for Real-World Evidence Analytics in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) served as keynote speaker, followed by a series of parallel sessions that included topics about patient centered trials, data integration and adaptive design, and dose optimization. Hong and Marlina Nasution, PhD, each hosted a poster session.
Breakout sessions followed the poster presentations, which allowed participants to ask presenters questions about their respective topics and provided a space to hold more in-depth conversations.
Two presenters from each poster session earned an award and delivered their key messages to the audience. The presentations provided a preview of what’s to come in the next year. “It’s exciting,” Hong said, “and it makes me think, ‘what else can I do on top of that? How can I do more?’ It gives me direction for future research.”
Day three featured Vice President of Pfizer, Demissie Alemayehu, PhD, as keynote speaker. There were also three parallel sessions about borrowing in oncology trials, using real-world data in clinical trials, and decentralized clinical trials.
Organizing committee member, Herbert Pang, PhD added, “This symposium was perfect for anyone doing drug development to engage with statisticians and data scientists, or those in other aspects of research.”
The symposium was free and open to students across the U.S. It provided networking opportunities, information on how to apply their knowledge, and more post-graduate options to consider.
Based on the discussions and the presentations during the symposium, the Journal of Biopharmaceutical Statistics will publish a special issue highlighting DISS2023. Chow and Shibing Deng, PhD, will be the co-guest editors. A full list of course and session descriptions, and poster session winners can be found here.
The organizing committee of this event would like to thank the support from our industry and non-profit sponsors, including Amgen, ASA NC Chapter, BeiGene, Boehringer Ingelheim, Genentech, Janssen, International Chinese Statistical Association, Journal of Biopharmaceutical Statisticians, Merck, Parexel, Pfizer, PPD, SAS, UCB, and ViiV.