(Vienna, 19 October 2023) Elias Laurin Meyer, PhD graduate of MedUni Vienna, has been awarded the prize for the best dissertation in applied statistics by the Austrian Statistical Society for his dissertation written at the Institute of Medical Statistics at the Medical University of Vienna. He received the prize for his thesis "Designing exploratory platform trials", which was supervised by Franz König.
Modern medical research faces complex challenges in the development of new therapies. As a result of the desire to generate more robust evidence for evaluating the safety and efficacy of therapies while simultaneously increasing efficiency in testing, some established paradigms of drug development have been scrutinized and so-called platform trials have become increasingly popular. Platform trials are studies that investigate multiple treatments within the context of a single disease, with the exceptional feature of being able to run indefinitely and allow additional treatments and new substudies to enter or exit the study over time. Platform trials have distinct strengths, including adaptive design elements, the testing of multiple treatments within a single study, faster decision-making, seamless integration of new treatments into the ongoing study, enhanced comparability through standardization, and opportunities for collaboration among different consortia/companies.
In the award-winning work, completed as part of the EU-PEARL project (https://eu-pearl.eu/), Elias Laurin Meyer first examines the evolution of platform trials, including software for simulating these study designs, in two systematic reviews. Subsequently, two platform trial designs are proposed and investigated in collaboration with international experts from the EU-PEARL project in two published simulation studies for a specific indication (non-alcoholic steatohepatitis). Finally, various options for modular simulation of complex clinical trials and subsequent visualization of simulation results are discussed using two software products developed by Elias Laurin Meyer.
With this award, the Austrian Statistical Society promotes young scientific talent. Every year, prizes are awarded for the best final theses in theoretical and applied statistics. The winners had the opportunity to present their work during the Austrian Statistical Days.
About Elias Laurin Meyer
Elias Laurin Meyer studied statistics at the University of Vienna, where he completed his bachelor's degree in 2016, his master's degree in 2018 and was admitted to the faculty’s Class of Excellence. He worked at the Center for Medical Data Science at the Medical University of Vienna from 2016 to 2023 and completed his PhD studies in 2022 under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Dr. Franz König with the highest obtainable grade. After completion of the EU-PEARL project, he joined Berry Consultants, where he is currently employed as a Statistical Scientist. During his time at the Medical University of Vienna, he won the Arthur-Linder Prize, as well as the prize for the best master's thesis in applied statistics, taught over 15 seminars and published six articles as the lead author in applied statistical research and over 30 articles as a co-author in medical journals.
References
[1] Meyer, Elias Laurin, et al. "The evolution of master protocol clinical trial designs: a systematic literature review." Clinical Therapeutics 42.7 (2020): 1330-1360.
[2] Meyer, Elias Laurin, et al. "Systematic review of available software for multi-arm multi-stage and platform clinical trial design." Trials 22.1 (2021): 1-14.
[3] Meyer, Elias Laurin, et al. "Decision rules for identifying combination therapies in open‐entry, randomized controlled platform trials." Pharmaceutical Statistics 21.3 (2022): 671-690.
[4] Meyer, Elias Laurin, et al. “Designing an exploratory phase 2b platform trial in NASH with correlated, co-primary binary endpoints.” Plos one 18.3 (2023): e0281674.
[5] Meyer, Elias Laurin, et al. “CohortPlat: Simulation of cohort platform trials investigating combination therapies”. arXiv:2202.02182 [stat.AP].
[6] Meyer, Elias Laurin, et al. "An interactive R-Shiny app for quickly visualizing a tidy, long dataset with multiple dimensions with an application in clinical trial simulations for platform trials." SoftwareX 22 (2023): 101347.
[7] Meyer, Elias Laurin, et al. "SIMPLE-a modular tool for simulating complex platform trials." SoftwareX, Volume 23, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2023.101515.
[8] Meyer, Elias Laurin. “SIMPLE – SIMulating PLatform trials Efficiently”. https://github.com/el-meyer/simple.
[9] Meyer, Elias Laurin. “AIRSHIP - An Interactive R-SHIny apP for visualizing tidy long data”. https://github.com/el-meyer/airship.
[10] Meyer, Elias Laurin. “CohortPlat”. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/CohortPlat/index.html.
[11] Meyer, Elias Laurin. “cats”. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/cats/index.html.