About the Project
MRC DTP in Precision Medicine
Up to 26 fully funded studentship positions are available across the University of Glasgow and Edinburgh. Our next intake will be for PhD projects commencing September 2017.
The Precision Medicine Doctoral Training Programme (DTP) offers PhD with Integrated Study studentships funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC), The University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow. Hosted by the University of Edinburgh in collaboration with the University of Glasgow and the Karolinska Institute, this prestigious programme provides PhD research training alongside taught courses over four years of study and welcomed its first cohort of students in September 2016.
This new Doctoral Training Programme focuses on training PhD students in key MRC skills priorities in quantitative skills (mathematics, statistics, computation, and developing digital excellence) as applied to variety of data sources (from ‘omics’ to health records), and interdisciplinary skills including imaging and stratified medicine.
Supervisors
Dr David McAllister - [Email Address Removed]
Dr Jim Lewsey - [Email Address Removed]
Dr Nicholas Mills - [Email Address Removed]
Prof David Newby - [Email Address Removed]
Abstract
Determining which treatments are best for which patients is one of the greatest challenges in medical research. The conventional approach to answering this question, the randomised controlled trial, is valid but not always generalisable, meaning that patients in trials are typically younger and healthier than the wider population of patients to whom the results could potentially be applied. Moreover, trials are also hugely resource-intensive, meaning that many important clinical questions remain unanswered. Therefore, there is considerable interest in using data from large healthcare databases to compare outcomes among patients taking different treatments as part of their routine healthcare. However, because patients taking different treatments differ in numerous other ways – for example, in terms of other health conditions, frailty and socio-economic status, such comparisons are frequently unreliable.
One promising method for overcoming this weakness is through the use of instrumental variable analysis. In this project, the PhD candidate will explore the use of “prescribing preference”, which has been shown to have good properties in the literature, to address a clinically important question in a large enhanced-routine healthcare database.
The PhD will be supervised by a team comprising an epidemiologist (Dr David McAllister, Wellcome Trust Intermediate Clinical Fellow and Senior Clinical Lecturer), medical statistician (Dr Jim Lewsey, Reader in Medical Statistics), and two academic cardiologists with considerable expertise of the clinical question and the relevant datasets (Professors David Newby and Nick Mills, British Heart Foundation Senior Clinical Fellow and Chair, respectively).
We are looking for a candidate with good quantitative skills and a keen interest/experience in statistical modelling and epidemiology.