Staburo @ LMU Institute Colloquium of the Institute of Statistics

Hannes Buchner, Staburo Managing Director, along with working students Maria Blanco and Tim Müller, will present their applied research project titled “Deriving interpretable thresholds for variable importance in random forests by permutation” at the colloquium of the Statistics Institute at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) on May 10th at 16:00.

The research project is a collaboration with the Staburo employees Laura Schlieker, Hannes Buchner, Maria Blanco and Tim Müller as well as Armin Ott from Roche Diagnostics. Investigating Random Forests is an active field of interest to researchers and practitioners alike, as they are flexible and well-suited to deal with many challenges present in high-dimensional biological data, while having a proven record of offering good predictive accuracy. The group is working on algorithms that compare variable importance scores, with the goal of identifying all relevant variables that play a role in this prediction. The talk will cover the application of the established Boruta algorithm on real and simulated data sets and compare its performance to a variation of the method proposed by the working group.

The colloquium is an academic gathering that provides an opportunity for students, researchers, and professionals from academia and industry to exchange ideas, present and discuss their latest research findings in the field of statistics and its applications. It is open for both in-person and online participation, further information – including how to join and the project abstract – can be found in the colloquium’s webpage.

We are excited to present our work at the colloquium and extend an invitation to all interested parties to attend and participate in the discussions.

Meet the Management – Angelika Böhm – Director Programming and Visualisation

Since our team grew substantially, we searched, appointed, and enabled a bigger management team at Staburo, consisting of two heads (of departments) and six directors (focus on data science topics). We want to give them a chance to talk about themselves and their passion! Therefore, we publish a mini news series about the management team members and will continue and at the same time end this series with our Director Programming and Visualisation, Angelika Böhm.

Who are you?

Hi, my name is Angelika Böhm and I am Director Programming and Visualisation at Staburo. I studied Biometrics at the university in Ulm. I have been working at Staburo for more than 6 years now. It all started in a very small team, and I have been part of the development of the company. Since 2021 I am responsible for the programming activities at Staburo.

Please tell us something about your area of work.

As Director Programming and Visualisation, I am trying to establish the processes and procedures to provide our colleagues the framework to retrieve their full potential. Precision and love to details are key capabilities in programming. But also making data easy understandable via visualisation is a big part of our work. Standardising without losing flexibility and creativity to be effective and not only efficient is the overarching principle of this focus area.

What are your goals for your role?

My goals are to further improve our programming environment and train people to have fun with programming. We want to facilitate the entry into learning this skill set in the field of data science even if it is challenging.

Thanks again to all Staburo heads and directors for providing some insights into their focus areas and for being open during our mini-interview series.

The previous interviews could be found here: Stefan Bentink, Habib Esmaeili, Katrin Frank, Lena Herich, Luciana Husfeld, Janine Roy and Laura Schlieker

Staburo @ PSI Biomarkers SIG Webinar

A couple of weeks ago, our colleagues participated in the PSI Biomarkers SIG webinar on the topic of “Biomarkers in Clinical Development”.

PSI is a community which is dedicated to leading and promoting the use of statistics within the healthcare industry for the benefit of patients. PSI connects more than 1000 like-minded individuals around the world who enjoy exchanging ideas and networking.

The 90-minutes webinar was well planned and fully packed with presentations about recent advances in biomarker-based enrichment designs, machine learning for biomarkers, and data repositories for biomarker use cases. The PSI Biomarkers SIG aspired to create a bigger focus on data repositories and thus the very experienced speakers coming from the University of Warwick, from Boehringer Ingelheim and from AstraZeneca presented their latest insights on these topics.

All attendees had the opportunity to participate in the discussions that revolved around the following topics: “issues and potential solutions in predictive biomarker-driven enrichment trial design”, “thoughts on the past, present and future of Machine Learning for biomarkers”, and “where are the publicly available biomarker data”.

Thanks to the organizers and the speakers for sharing their latest insights on these exciting and current topics. For more details about this webinar check out the PSI event site.

What’s next this year? At PSI conference 2023 in June there will be another biomarkers session as well as another interesting webinar in Q3 in 2023.

We are already looking forward to more and new insights!

Staburo academy – Clinical trial disclosure & transparency online workshop

There is an increasing demand for transparency in clinical trials. This interest in transparency is not only demanded by the public but also by global regulators like FDA (US) and EMA (EU), with the overall aim being to make as much clinical trial information public.

For study managers in smaller companies and in academia it can be hard to keep up with this constantly evolving landscape of regulations. Additionally, the scope of required information, the increased demand for disclosure of documents, and actual data entry into platforms is often challenging.

This interactive workshop is designed to bring you up to date with the currently applicable regulations. We will have group sessions to practice protocol and results data entry into the platforms and will give advice on handling timelines and necessary record updates. Following this workshop, you will be confident in disclosing your studies in full compliance with applicable regulations and your own transparency goals.

The workshop is addressed (but not restricted) to industry or academia professionals who are interested in clinical trial disclosure and transparency.

The course will be held in English and takes place on 25th & 26th of May 2023. You can find more details here.

For questions and registration please contact: academy@staburo.de

Looking forward to seeing you in the online workshop!

Meet the Management – Lena Herich – Director Biostatistics

Since our team grew substantially, we searched, appointed, and enabled a bigger management team at Staburo, consisting of two heads (of departments) and six directors (focus on data science topics). We want to give them a chance to talk about themselves and their passion! Therefore, we publish a mini news series about the management team members and will continue with our Director Biostatistics, Lena Herich.

Who are you?

My name is Lena Herich, I am Director of Biostatistics with the focus area of Early Clinical Development. After my diploma in the field of mathematics, I have done my PhD at the University of Hamburg during which I have developed a strong interest in data analysis in medical research. Since then I have been working for many years as a biostatistician in clinical trials, in many different indications and study phases.

Tell us something about your area of expertise.

In the last years, I have focused on the field of early clinical development. At Staburo we are working on a high number of early phase trials, comprising for example single and multiple rising dose trials or studies investigating drug-drug interactions or relative bioavailability / bioequivalence.

What are your goals for your role?

Our team at Staburo already has strong experience in this area. The aim is to keep the group of biostatisticians growing steadily, while keeping the quality high. Additional goals are to ensure continuous training of our employees and to encourage the exchange between colleagues.

What motivates you as an individual?

It motivates me to work in an area that aims to improves the life of patients. I am always happy to learn more about different methods, trial designs, or areas. Moreover, I highly appreciate the open exchange and good working climate that we are having in the company!