In order for a new treatment or therapy to be used in medical practice, clinical trials must be run during the research and development process, often taking years to complete and costing millions of pounds.

Approximately 30,000 new clinical trials worldwide are now registered annually, with approximately 300,000 clinical studies registered globally since 2000. To improve efficiency of the clinical trial process, such that treatments can be identified and ruled out more quickly and cost-effectively, research at Reading has made important statistical contributions to the field of multi-arm multi-stage adaptive designs.

Professor Sue Todd’s research combines methodological work on novel statistical design and analysis approaches with practical research to facilitate implementation of statistical methods in the healthcare sector. Collaborative projects with different institutions have underpinned clinical trials and been instrumental in the development of software resulting in time savings, economic benefits and advantages to patients. Research has also fed into the development of two sets of trial reporting guidelines, recently published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), that serve as checklists for authors who wish to publish the results of clinical trials, making studies more transparent and easier to interpret, ultimately benefiting clinical practice.

Research collaborators
Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, University of Leeds, University of Sheffield, University of Warwick

Find out more
View the full impact case study on the REF 2021 website: Influencing the uptake and reporting of adaptive designs in clinical trials