Biostatistics Facility

Abstract: Biostatistics Facility (BF) The Biostatistics Facility (BF) is a UPMC Hillman Cancer Center (HCC) shared resource that provides experimental designs and data analyses for clinical, pre-clinical and translational research at HCC. Each HCC disease center has a contact statistician who oversees the support of that center’s clinical trials, grant applications, and pre-clinical and translational research. The laboratory-based and population programs are also served by statisticians selected on the basis of disease focus and technical specialty (e.g., RNAseq expression statistical analysis). The master statisticians support the programmatic biostatisticians’ work and also function independently. In addition to traditional statistical methods, the faculty and staff are proficient in Bayesian, computationally intense and machine learning methods. BF worked closely with the Cancer Therapeutics, Cancer Biology, Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy, Biobehavioral Cancer Control, Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention, and Cancer Virology programs in the last funding cycle. BF personnel regularly interact with Cancer Bioinformatics Services, Cancer Genome Facility and IMCPL to ensure the integrity and appropriate statistical analyses of biomarker and -omics data. BF personnel meet on a nearly daily basis with CPDM to ensure that clinical trials are designed, implemented, completed and reported in accordance with the requirements of the Department of Health and Human Services. Due to the rapidly increasing complexity of research technology for DNA sequencing and genotyping, RNA sequencing and expression, targeting and discovery proteomics, and immunoassays, programmatic statisticians work closely with biostatisticians (some who are also programmatic biostatisticians, and some outside the BF), bioinformaticians, epidemiologists and informaticians who are experts in these platforms. Over 95% of the BF effort is dedicated to cancer-related research HCC.