PhD: Funded studentship on the design of clinical trials in infectious diseases at Lancaster University

Fully funded PhD opportunity in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Lancaster University commencing in October 2019. The PhD will develop clinical trial designs for establishing treatment duration in infectious diseases (further details below) and be supervised by Prof Thomas Jaki (Lancaster University), Dr Pavel Mozgunov (Lancaster Univsity) and Prof Gerry Davies (University of Liverpool).

This 3 year studentship covers tuition fees, research support costs, and a stipend at UKRI standard rates (£14,999 pa for 2019/20) and is open to UK and EU candidates.

To apply please send your cover letter and CV to Thomas Jaki no later then 3rd March 2019.

Synopsis:
In many infectious diseases such as Tuberculosis (TB) or Hepatitis B (HBV) the period of treatment with current standard regimes is lengthy. In Tuberculosis and HBV, for example, treatment periods of 6 and 12 months, respectively, are typical. Long treatment periods results in a large burden on the patients, potentially high costs and increased risk of non-compliance to treatment. Novel treatments or combinations of treatments in these areas, however, offer the opportunity for both higher efficacy and shorter treatment periods.

In this project, novel clinical trial designs will be investigated in an exploratory stage, identifying the shortest, promising treatment duration followed seamlessly by a confirmatory stage to test the effect of the treatment under this treatment duration. (Bayesian) adaptive methods for this purpose that identify the best treatment duration while maintaining control of the overall errors in the study will be explored.