Team spirit, speed and strength. Qualities, which our clients normally value in biostatistics projects with us – we wanted to bring on the race track in the 2018 B2RUN in Munich.

The 6.1 km long was scheduled to take place in the Olympic Park, with the finish in the classic Olympic Stadium.

Unfortunately, a thunderstorm hit Munich, when we were about to start the race. After we got soaking wet and waited for over half an hour in the rain, the whole event was cancelled due to safety concerns. Ironically, the clouds cleared up directly after that but the decision was already made.

There was nothing left to do for us, but to discuss, if our team’s running times, i.e. 0:00h – from a statistics perspective – were our best results, or if we cannot count that…

After the B2RUN fail, we had dinner together at the restaurant Café Blücher in Munich, including the very French award ceremony for the World Cup Tippspiel, which was won with the closest possible margin by Josef Höfler. Despite the weather, it was a great event with a sporty team – next time maybe even with actual running!

Staburo goes Bioinformatics!

We are very glad to welcome Dr. Janine Roy in our team. Janine is a bioinformatician by training, with an excellent education and broad working experience in the clinical, as well as the academic environment. She will support our clients in the areas of bioinformatics and precision medicine. Thanks to her joining our team, we can now get insights into the biomarker field from a different perspective and offer our clients even better solutions in their translational medicine challenges.
We are very happy and lucky to have you in our team and look forward to a great cooperation!

We are very glad to welcome Ningfu Sun in our Munich team. Ningfu supports us in biostatistics & statistical programming. With Ningfu, we win a team member with an excellent education, great biostatistics and programming skills and significant project experience. We are very happy about your support and are looking forward to a good and sustainable cooperation!

We invited clients, employees and friends to our summer party on 8 June 2018. There were many reasons to celebrate, such as the move to our new shiny office earlier this year, and the 10 years anniversary of our business plan seminar participation at unternehmerTUM. After all guests have been greeted by our Staburo “flower girl”, we had tasty summer drinks and juicy roast beef with shrimps. As a special highlight – our guests could taste custom made “red ale” beer, which was actually re-brewed at the summer party! Upon request, tastings can be arranged in six weeks, in Munich. At night, the band “Felix and the Machines” played wonderful live rock/indie/pop music and we were delighted to see almost everyone dance. We thank all our guests and helpers to make our Sommerfest a party to remember and we hope to repeat such an event, soon! After such a great evening, we might even wear our Hawaiian shirts again …

UPDATE *** JUL 26, 2018 +++ UPDATE:

Look at these beautiful babies, 6 weeks after our Sommerfest – don’t they look delicious? They are all little “Staburators”. Tastings can be arranged in our office! Just contact us!

Staburo poster presentation at PSI 2018

Staburo Managing Director Dr. Hannes Buchner will present the enhanced rank-preserving structural failure time method (eRPSFT), to adjust for treatment switching in 3-arm superiority trials. Meet Hannes personally at the PSI 2018 conference “Breaking Boundaries in Drug Development” from 3rd to 6th June 2018 in Amsterdam.

Introduction to the topic

Rapid progress in oncology and the according approvals of medications leads to fast and frequent change in the standard of care (SOC). Therefore, in trials with more than 2 arms, the comparison between investigational therapy (A) and former SOC (C), and the comparison between treatment (A) and alternative treatment therapy (B), the new SOC, are of interest. With new effective treatments, some of the patients will switch from treatment B or SOC therapy at some time point during the study period to treatment A. Treatment switching is not just an issue for economic evaluation. It is a problem for clinical and economic assessment.

Conclusions from our work

The enhanced RPSFT performed good with small bias for the calculations. Calculated confidence limits from the RPSFT model containing the true expected HR, for every comparison made. The uncorrected HR overestimates the true effect much more than the corrected HR. Only the confidence limits of the comparison of A vs. B in each scenario for the uncorrected HR contains the true expected HR, all other confidence limit exceed the HR. eRPSFT improves the estimation and should be used to adjust for treatment switching in 3-arm superiority trials.

If you are interested in Crossover Correction methods in Oncology, feel free to approach our colleague Hannes at PSI 2018 in Amsterdam or send us an email to info@staburo.com.