Medical College of Wisconsin: Receives NIH grant to develop statistical evaluation of bone marrow transplantation

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Toranj Marphetia (toranj@mcw.edu)
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The Medical College of Wisconsin has received a four-year, $886,468 grant from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop statistical methods to analyze long-term outcomes of bone marrow transplantation.

John P. Klein, Ph.D., professor of population health and director of biostatistics, is principal investigator of the grant.

Data from medical studies on survival, competing risks, and multi-state models and repeated measures will be used to develop standardized techniques.

“The primary application is in bone marrow transplantation, but these techniques can be applied to a wide range of medical areas,” says Dr. Klein.

Specific projects include:

– Development of a regression approach that can be used as summary model for multi-state models.

– Continued development and study of alternatives to the current model for survival and competing risks data.

– Development and study of techniques for measuring explained variation which can be used to examine and compare models for predicting a patient’s outcome.

– Techniques to include covariates into models for multi-state data and development of methods for modeling repeated measurements taken over time.

The grant will enable researchers to continue to refine existing methods and develop new statistical models for assessing risk-data and survival and predicting patient outcomes.