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!

Staburo @ European Statistical Forum in Munich

On Tuesday, 14th November 2023, the Staburo team comprising Hannes Buchner, Laura Schlieker and Sarah Mwiberi Juckel attended the 14th European Statistical Forum held in Munich, Germany. The conference was organised by life science academy and attracted participants from both academia and industry all over Europe.

The theme of the conference was statistical methodology in precision medicine and the role of artificial intelligence. A wide range of topics all centered around precision medicine were presented including creation of fairer ML algorithms, quantification of uncertainty on ML systems, training a learner algorithm, biomarker threshold optimisation, application of polygenic scores in clinical trials as well as AI/ML and omics methods. The keynote speaker was Prof. Werner Brannath from the University of Bremen. He gave a presentation on the population-wise error rate (PWER), a novel type I error rate which has applications in clinical trials with multiple populations where there is a chance for multiple type I errors.

The conference concluded with an interactive Q & A session, in which speakers and attendees discussed the current and future roles of statistics, precision medicine and artificial intelligence in the pharmaceutical industry.

The conference also allowed for networking and intense discussions during breaks. We look forward to sharing our insights with our colleagues at Staburo.

Staburo @ BIO-Europe 2023 in Munich

Staburo’s Managing Director Roland Stieger joined the BIO-Europe two weeks ago and enjoyed the great networking opportunities of this partnering conference with over 5000 delegates!

In addition to several one-on-one meetings, in which Roland discussed data science challenges of potential partners, we were very happy to have our brand and company information shared at the Bavarian booth, thanks to Bio-M.

Roland also attended the well-organized official BIO-Europe evening receptions, in the famous Residenz and at the Nockherberg where it was very nice to catch up with known and introduced colleagues, all from our industry. Thanks to EBD for this great conference!

Staburo @ the 9th Survival Analysis for Junior Researchers

From 13 to 15 September 2023, the 9th SAfJR (Survival Analysis for Junior Researchers) conference took place at the Reisensburg Castle in Günzburg, Germany. The conference, attended by over 60 researchers from around the world, provided a platform for sharing current knowledge in survival analysis. 

The event featured several talks and a poster session. Invited speakers included Torsten Hothorn from the University of Zurich, who presented a tutorial on “A transformation perspective on Survival Analysis”; Torben Martinussen from the University of Copenhagen, who discussed “Subtleties in the interpretation of hazard ratios”; and Jan Feifel from Merck Healthcare KGaA, who spoke about “Real world evidence supporting clinical development in Oncology”. 

Staburo was represented by Maria Blanco, who presented a poster titled “Evaluation of event rate differences using stratified Kaplan-Meier estimates with Mantel-Haenszel weights & adjusted hybrid variance estimators”. This project, a collaboration between Stephan Bischofberger, Hannes Buchner, Gabriele Bleckert and Ling Zhu from Staburo, Rainer-Georg Göldner from Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma GmbH & Co. KG and Bernhard Haller from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), was focused on utilizing the stratified Z test with Kaplan Meier estimates at a fixed time to test the superiority of treatments with survival endpoints. The team aimed to optimize the approach by considering different variance estimators and weights for the strata groups. For those interested, the complete poster is available below: 

The conference, held at the historic Reisensburg Castle – now maintained and used by the Ulm University for scientific conferences – also included a social dinner for attendees. 

Staburo appreciates the opportunity to have participated in this event and looks forward to future conferences. 

Staburo @ Oktoberfest 2023 

O’ zapft is or was – the Staburo annual Wiesn event took place a few days ago. The Oktoberfest is one of Staburo’s annual team events.

This year we were lucky again and had enough tables (70 seats) for the whole team and long-time customers in the Braurösl tent. We are looking back to an entertaining evening including, singing, and dancing within the tent and to some exciting roller coaster rides for some of our colleagues.

In our constantly growing international team, we also had colleagues with us this year for whom it was their first visit to Oktoberfest.

Thanks to everyone who made this evening a wonderful and fun Wiesn team event 2023 – we are already looking forward to the next time!