Network will spark new IDEAS in drug development

A new £2.7 million international training network project, led by a team at Lancaster University, will develop a generation of medical statisticians dedicated to achieving early stage drug development success. The four-year research and training initiative, which has attracted funding from the European Union, is due to get underway next year. IDEAS (Improving Design, Evaluation and Analysis of Early Drug Development) is led by Dr Thomas Jaki, who heads up Lancaster University's Medical and Pharmaceutical Statistics Research Unit. "Recently, it has been recognised that more care needs to be taken during the early stages of drug development to avoid lengthy and costly confirmatory studies in the final stages with ineffective or even harmful treatments," explains Dr Jaki. "It is essential to implement efficient methods for the design and analysis of such early development studies. The expertise in this area is, however, limited at the moment and adequate methodology is only partially available." The network brings together eight partners from across Europe - universities, research institutes and pharmaceutical companies - to get the training network off the ground. The network will provide places for 14 PhD students working in early drug development across Europe.