$12.5 million NCI grant for US researchers to improve cancer drug clinical

The USA's National Cancer Institute has awarded a $12.5 million grant over five years to researchers at three US universities, UNC, Duke and NC State, to develop new methods for the design and analysis of cancer clinical trials for cancer drug candidates, the UNC News Service reported recently. More than $2.5 million from the NCI will fund the first year of the project.

'Statistical Methods for Cancer Clinical Trials' is one of the largest grants of its kind to be awarded by the National Cancer Institute. The project is led by three principal investigators: Michael Kosorok, professor and chairman of the biostatistics department of the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health; Marie Davidian, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Statistics and director of the Center for Quantitative Sciences in Biomedicine at NC State; and Stephen George, professor of biostatistics at Duke.

The project will support a major collaborative, multidisciplinary effort that takes advantage of the unrivaled concentration of leading statistical and clinical experts at the three campuses and the two highly rated cancer centers at UNC and Duke. The leadership team also includes three co-principal investigators: Joseph Ibrahim, Alumni Distinguished Professor of Biostatistics and director of the Center for Innovative Clinical Trials at UNC; Sin-Ho Jung, professor of biostatistics at Duke; and Anastasios Tsiatis, Drexel Professor of Statistics at NC State.