Understanding and alleviating selective depletion bias in vaccine efficacy estimation

This project will expose systematic errors in widely used methods for estimating and translating the efficacy of vaccines and outline a strategy for alleviating those problems. Explicitly, methods that neglect realistic heterogeneities in susceptibility to infection among individuals in a trial, tend to underestimate vaccine efficacy, a bias that is exacerbated with the length of the trial and the intensity of exposure to infection in trial settings. To overcome this problem, rates of infection collected for similar populations in different environments will be employed (where environments cover a range of exposure intensities, either controlled experimentally or selected from nature) to unlock the heterogeneity in individual susceptibilities by analysing the observed trends. Estimated distributions will then be embedded into new predictive models for use in policy development.

Anyone interested in applying for this studentship can do so here: https://pegasus.mis.strath.ac.uk/applicantentry/#/?ppio=293842&opportunity=1894156