Biostatistics Shared Resource

PROJECT SUMMARY / ABSTRACT The Biostatistics Shared Resource (BSR) has been an integral component of the University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center (UWCCC) for the past 38 years. BSR personnel include doctoral and masters level biostatisticians from the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics (BMI), including six UWCCC members, who devote dedicated effort to advancing the research goals of the UWCCC. The mission of BSR is to enhance cancer research excellence by providing crucial biostatistics expertise through consultation and collaboration with UWCCC members in research ranging from laboratory, to clinical, to population science. Specific Aim 1. BSR will continue to engage in impactful scientific collaboration with UWCCC members and thereby advance an interdisciplinary approach to cancer research. Specific Aim 2. BSR will ensure cost effectiveness by matching BSR faculty and staff scientists to specific disease/research areas, standardizing operations and data analysis tools, and capitalizing on the extensive expertise and computing infrastructure available within BMI. To achieve these aims, BSR contributes to UWCCC research design, grant application development, data analysis, and communication of results. BSR facilitates the selection of adequate study subjects, assists in the identification of suitable study endpoints, provides data analysis plans and sample size estimations/power calculations that align with study design, conducts and provides interim monitoring for studies, analyzes results for presentation of research findings at scientific meetings, and prepares final technical reports for scientific publication. BSR served 102 unique UWCCC program members across all six scientific programs and contributed to 153 cancer relevant UWCCC program member publications over the 2017-2021 period. BSR operates under a collaborative business model in which short term support to UWCCC members is funded by the CCSG or other institutional funds and long term collaborations are funded by cancer focused grants and contracts from the NCI, other NIH institutes, federal agencies, and private foundations, including multiple R01, U01, P01, and P50 awards. This model of collaboration, instead of fee for service provided, has proven to be highly effective and is strongly endorsed by the UWCCC leadership. BSR responds to the evolving needs of UWCCC members by adding and aligning expert biostatistics faculty and staff statisticians/data analysts. BSR advances the education mission of the UWCCC through direct consultative interactions with trainees engaged in cancer research with center members, and by involving graduate students in our statistics and biomedical data science graduate programs in collaborative cancer research projects. Collaboration of BSR faculty with UWCCC members generates new ideas for statistical methodology research and thereby promotes statistical theory and methodology development, completing the full cycle of collaboration and scientific interaction. BSR has been and remains critical to the success of UWCCC’s mission to defeat cancer through rapid application of groundbreaking research to reduce the cancer burden across Wisconsin and beyond.