We are delighted to announce our inaugural PHASTAR 750! During the month of November, teams of five from each of PHASTAR’s UK offices will aim to walk, run, skip, jump, cycle (or anything in between!) 750 miles, encouraging motivation, collaboration and team-work during a time when all our staff are working from home.
With lockdowns comes isolation for so many – so we are proud to be running this competition with the aim of fundraising for Sport in Mind – The Mental Health Sporting Charity, whose aim is to improve the lives of people experiencing mental health problems through sport and physical activity.
Pfizer and BioNTech have today announced results from the first interim analysis from their Phase III study of a vaccine candidate against COVID-19 and have concluded over 90% vaccine effectiveness. Do these results mean that there is finally some light at the end of the very long COVID-19 tunnel? Here’s what we know so far…
PHASTAR’s Head of Statistical Research and Consultancy, Professor Jennifer Rogers, was recently announced as the winner of the annual HealthWatch Award for 2020. For her acceptance speech, Jen grappled with the COVID-19 statistics that we have been seeing since the start of the pandemic, trying to make sense of messy data and calling into question some of the more dubious claims that have been made.
I’ve always felt that public engagement is an important part of my career and I have strived to be an ambassador in my field, bringing statistics to the masses. This isn’t just because I am passionate about statistics, but also because I feel it’s important that the general public have a basic understanding of statistical concepts. Every single day, we are bombarded with news headlines telling us what we should and shouldn’t be doing and we are expected to use these sometimes-shocking headlines to inform decisions on how to live our everyday lives. Sometimes, these headlines can be misleading, and often our own personal experiences can skew our interpretation, so I feel that it is essential to give people the tools they need to ask the right questions of the data that they see, so that they can make informed evidence-based decisions.
PHASTAR doesn’t just do clinical trial reporting - currently I'm contracting with another company as a Data Scientist. Working at PHASTAR offers me the opportunity to work on new and interesting projects - all the experience with clinical data and the knowledge of quality control I’ve learned over my time here has allowed me to branch out to a project where I get the freedom to explore the data as I see fit.
9:00am
We are mid-sprint, so everyone has their tasks assigned and we continue working through them. I check my emails in case anything has changed but otherwise I can continue where I left off yesterday.
I like to have a fresh coffee in hand as I start working, although I have been known to accidentally leave it brewing for upwards of half an hour while getting caught up in my work. Thankfully today is not one of those days and I can start converting the caffeine into code!
PHASTAR has recently contributed to an industry collaboration led by PhUSE to create two white papers to support data scientists during the COVID-19 pandemic. The first white paper covered the impact of the pandemic on clinical trials data in studies in a variety of diseases, whilst the second related to issues arising when carrying out clinical trials where the disease was the COVID-19 virus. In the second paper, issues such as data collection, analysis and sharing are discussed alongside commentary on the regulatory background.
