Staburo Christmas Party 2023 & Merry Christmas everyone

A couple of days ago we came together in Munich for our annual Christmas party. All colleagues from Munich, the surrounding area or even from other cities met at Nockherberg for our first Staburo ice curling company event. Our colleagues played across teams enthusiastic and fully committed on four lanes, drank mulled wine, and enjoyed the winter wonderland.

Followed by this fun and snowy part of ice curling we all moved on together to our dinner location – Falke 23 in Munich. Here we spent a wonderful evening with delicious food, good drinks, an award ceremony, as well as many conversations and laughts. We are delighted with this successful evening and that so many of our colleagues were able to attend!

Once again, we would like to thank all our employees for their great commitment and our customers for their trust and great cooperation. We are already looking forward to the next year and what it has to offer for all of us.

We wish you a merry Christmas, relaxing holidays, and a happy new year 2024!

Staburo presents @ PSI Biomarkers SIG meeting

A couple of weeks ago, Staburo’s Head of Biostatistics and Managing Director, Hannes Buchner, took the opportunity to share insights from the research project titled “Deriving Interpretable Thresholds for Variable Importance in Random Forests by Permutation” at the monthly meeting of the PSI Biomarkers European Special Interest Group (SIG). 

PSI, a non-profit community, is committed to advancing and promoting the use of statistics within the healthcare industry to ultimately benefit patients. Connecting over a thousand members and fostering communication among more than 2000 individuals in its online communities, PSI offers a platform where professionals can exchange ideas and network. Throughout their careers, members are supported with resources such as scientific meetings, online training, networking events, and the journal Pharmaceutical Statistics. 

The PSI Biomarkers SIG, comprising 44 members from industry and academia, aims to develop advanced analytical methods for biomarker analysis in clinical development. The group also seeks to enhance interaction with various disciplines and establish connections with other SIGs. 

Hannes’ presentation detailed a collaborative effort between Staburo employees Laura Schlieker, Maria Blanco and Tim Müller, Armin Ott from Roche Diagnostics and Roman Hornung from the Institute for Medical Information Processing, Biometry and Epidemiology, University of Munich. The project explores the Random Forest (RF) method and its application in high-dimensional data analysis, biomarkers research, and personalized medicine. The research group has been focused on identifying all relevant covariables in RF predictions. During the presentation, Hannes introduced the Boruta algorithm, outlined the improvements proposed by the research group, and compared the performance of both methods using real and simulated data sets. 

Staburo’s participation in the PSI Biomarkers SIG meeting was an opportunity to engage with its members – thanks for the great organisation!

Staburo @ APF meeting in Darmstadt

A few days ago – we from Staburo GmbH, Hannes Buchner, Stephan Bischofberger, Gabriele Bleckert, Sarah Musiol, Jiali Lin  – joined the annual APF meeting in November: It all started with a fantastic get-together on Thursday evening at the Grohe Brauhaus in Darmstadt. We had a great evening and lots of networking opportunities in this location with joining so many participants from our industry.

The next day started with our morning session including 4 great and interesting presentations about biomarkers and decision making of which one was by our Managing Director, Hannes Buchner. We gained many insights into biomarker analyses and tools at different companies from sponsors to CROs.

After a well-deserved lunch break we kicked-off our afternoon session which was about estimands in early phase trials in oncology with 2 presentations. During those sessions and discussions the topic how to use estimands in early phase was challenged and in the end still recommended to use at least an ‘estimand thinking’ approach, since it is a must in late phase trials and since it helps understanding the actual objectives of the whole development program.

Many thanks to Merck for organizing and hosting this year’s meeting and also to everyone who joined and contributed to this interesting and insightful event.

We are already looking forward to the next meetings!