Demonstrating value for high priced novel treatments in oncology in an era of precision medicine: methodological and policy tools

MRC DTP in Precision Medicine

Up to 35 fully funded studentship positions are available across the University of Glasgow and Edinburgh. Our next intake will be for PhD projects commencing September 2018.

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 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:
Professor Andrew Briggs
Dr Kathleen Boyd
Dr Peter Bach

Project Summary:
Health systems around the world are struggling to accommodate the increasing cost of new cancer treatments. In the UK a new version of the cancer drugs fund has recently been initiated and both the European Society of Medical Oncology (ESMO) and the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) have recently published ‘value frameworks’. This PhD will explore both methodological challenges in showing value for new oncology products (such as: use of surrogate endpoints; the need for extrapolation; biomarker/subgroup analysis; adjusting for cross-over) and policy tools designed to improve the value of these new treatments to the health systems (such as: cancer drugs fund in UK; patient access schemes; outcomes-based contracting in US; use of value frameworks, application of stratified/precision medicine). A unique feature of this PhD will be the opportunity to collaborate not only within the University of Glasgow, but also with researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York through international collaborative links with that organisation. Research into the value of cancer therapies is timely and this PhD represents a real opportunity to address a contemporary health care policy problem from an international perspective.