In Giles Partington’s recent article for Pharmaceutical Outsourcing, the Phastar Principal Statistician explores how expert prior elicitation can enhance clinical research—particularly in areas with limited data, such as rare diseases and early-phase development. He outlines how this structured approach enables teams to formally incorporate expert opinion into Bayesian trial designs, supporting more efficient, relevant, and transparent trial design.
”One potential solution to quantifying uncertainty in the face of such issues lies with the use of Bayesian statistics and quantifying prior beliefs through expert opinion. Expert prior elicitation follows an interview process in which experts are asked a series of questions regarding their beliefs about, for example, a treatment effect. Based on the experts’ responses, a probability distribution can be derived which reflects what the experts believe as well as the uncertainty of that belief.”