Center for Innovative Study Design

Center for Innovative Study Design

The CISD supports the Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design program of the Stanford Center for Clinical and Translational Research and Education (SPECTRUM), as well as the Biostatistics Shared Resource of the Stanford Comprehensive Cancer Institute, and collaborates with researchers in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and health care industries.  It provides training in study design and statistical analysis to trainees at all levels and teaches courses in clinical research and Study Design Workshop, the Biostatistics Workshop, and many other programs in the university.  It provides expert consultation and planning in clinical research informatics to SPECTRUM and the Stanford Comprehensive Cancer Institute, as well as several departments and programs in the School of Medicine. It also teaches short courses for biostatisticians in industry and an Affiliates Program that brings experts in industry together with academics and regulatory agency statisticians and clinical scientists in campus-based collaborative workshops and forums. Its activities are supported by the National Institutes of Health, institutional contributions from the Dean of School of Medicine and Biomedical Data Science Department, membership fees of industrial affiliates, and philanthropic gifts.

The mission of the Center for Innovative Study Design (CISD) is to advance biomedical research by developing and disseminating new methods for the design of clinical, translational, and basic studies related to human disease and health.

In addition to its general collaborative role in research at Stanford, CISD is oriented toward a transformative 'grand aim' - to fully integrate the tools of statistical design into the practice of medicine, helping to advance drug development and create a system of health care that is capable of automatic knowledge-driven improvement at much faster pace. This aim is served by multiple lines of research and outreach that converge to help solve the considerable technical, scientific, and social problems that stand in the way.  These lines include novel designs of ecologically relevant clinical trials, new ways to take advantage of point-of-care informatics to introduce novel experimental methods into clinical care, optimal methods for deciding when and how to rework experiments as results come in, and software development for the implementation of the novel designs.  They also include an educational component, to create awareness in our colleagues in academia and industry of the extraordinary opportunities produced by the combination of the need to re-engineer the modern health-care system, our vastly increased capacity for computation and distributed data networking, the emerging science of personalized medicine, a more sophisticated population ready to engage more actively in medical care decisions, and the development of new forms of experiment that are better suited to the advancement of clinical knowledge. Finally, the Center has developed a network to outreach the pharmaceutical and regulatory centers of each coast, to Europe, and in particular to the Pacific Rim, with its emerging economic powers, that may be culturally, socially, and educationally prepared to leapfrog the developed world as they begin to grow their health care systems along with the knowledge industry that is critical to making informed, effective, and efficient decisions at both the patient and society level.

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