As Fred Hutch looks back on its 50-year history, Emeritus faculty member Ross Prentice is recognized for his leadership of the Public Health Sciences Division.

Critical work by a team of UW researchers that includes Marco Carone, a professor of biostatistics in the School of Public Health.

Recently, a team of biostatisticians led by Fred Hutch Cancer Center’s Peter Gilbert, PhD, garnered $17 million in funding from BARDA to identify correlates of protection (molecular shorthands that stand in for vaccine efficacy) for COVID-19 vaccines being tested through Project NextGen. Gilbert is a professor of biostatistics at the University of Washington School of Publich Health

“Our work is part of a growing effort to assess the implications of including race and ethnicity in clinical risk prediction models,” said lead investigator Quinn White, a biostatistics doctoral student at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Two years after starting treatment, patients with stage 3-4 classic Hodgkin lymphoma treated with nivolumab plus AVD chemotherapy had roughly one-half the risk of progression or death of those who had a standard treatment of brentuximab vedotin plus AVD. 

“This new analysis with more patient follow-up is critical to understanding the clinically meaningful benefit obtained from N-AVD compared to BV-AVD,” said Michael LeBlanc, PhD, lead biostatistician on the S1826 study and a UW professor of biostatistics.

Lianne Sheppard, new DEOHS interim chair, looks to build community, support faculty as she steps into new role. Sheppard is also a professor of biostatistics.

An international consortium founded to develop and evaluate methods to improve the use of polygenic risk scores (PRS) for predicting disease and health outcomes in populations of diverse ancestry has recently found some benefit in applying them to cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. Ken Rice, principal investigator of the consortium's coordinating center at the University of Washington and professor of biostatistics, is quoted.

Dr. Peter Gilbert shares insights about his work with HIV vaccine efficacy trials in relation to the recent PrEPVacc study. Gilbert said, "The result was that, for each vaccine, there is close to a 50-50 chance that the vaccine elevated acquisition risk vs. the vaccine was safe, as a synthesis of results over multiple ways to do the analysis, most importantly considering different prior distributions for vaccine efficacy."