October 12 2021
Jim Dignam, PhD, NRG Oncology's Group Statistician and Executive Director of the Statistics and Data Management Center, was a co-recipient of the 2021 Statistical Partnerships Among Academe, Industry, and Government (SPAIG) Award, given by the American Statistical Association. The SPAIG Award was established in 2002 to honor outstanding statistical partnerships across academe, industry, and government organizations. The award was given to the statistical team of the Intermediate Clinical Endpoints of Cancer of the Prostate (ICECaP) working group, of which NRG Oncology has played a critical contributing role.
Beginning in 2012, ICECaP has assembled data from a large portion of the extant clinical trials for early-stage prostate cancer to determine if an intermediate clinical endpoint (early measure of therapeutic efficacy) could provide an earlier indication of whether interventions can reduce mortality from prostate cancer. Over the years, the partnership has been extended to identify intermediate endpoints for advanced prostate cancer and has also been examining the health economic implications of accelerating therapeutic advances and promoting opportunities to increase harmonization of clinical investigations via endpoint definitions and other trial features. Among the influential findings already produced by the group was the establishment of metastasis-free survival as a suitable surrogate endpoint for overall survival.
In the award citation, the ICECaP statistical group is recognized “for building a statistically sound and solid foundation for speeding therapies for men with prostate cancer, and partnering globally with academia, industry, and government.”
Many individuals known to NRG and the NCTN are named in the award: Wanling Xie, MS, and Meredith Regan, ScD of Dana-Farber’s Department of Data Science, who lead the statistical team; Marc Buyse, PhD, of International Drug Development Institute, Inc. (IDDI); Susan Halabi, PhD, of Duke University; Laurence Collette, PhD, MSc, of IDDI; Catherine Tangen, PhD, of SWOG Cancer Research Network; Matt Sydes, PhD, MSc, Max Parmar, PhD, and Jayne Tierney, PhD, of the Medical Research Council Clinical Trials Unit; Boris Freidlin, PhD, of the National Cancer Institute; and James Dignam, PhD, of NRG Oncology and the University of Chicago. The many other ICECaP members and contributors, including project leader Christopher Sweeney, MBBS are listed at icecap.movember.com.