A partnership between the University of Washington (UW) Department of Biostatistics and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (Fred Hutch) has received an award from the American Statistical Association (ASA) for its work on dengue vaccine clinical research.

Award Details

The Statistical Partnerships Among Academe, Industry and Government (SPAIG) Award was presented at the recent Joint Statistical Meetings in Denver and is given to collaborations that have resulted in significant contributions to the statistical field with applications to real-world problems.

ASA cited the UW/Fred Hutch partnership for its work in developing innovative statistical methods for dengue vaccine efficacy trials that helped establish a base of evidence for licensure of the vaccine in several countries, including the U.S. where the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first dengue vaccine in May.

The partnership works in collaboration with Sanofi Pasteur Vaccine Statistics.

Team Members

The team of researchers is composed of current and former UW Biostatistics students as well as representatives from UW Statistics and Fred Hutch.

• From UW Biostatistics: David Benkeser (PhD ’15), Rong Fu (PhD ’14), and Jason Shao (MS ’17), and Brenda Price, a doctoral candidate. 
• Joint UW Biostatistics/FHCRC faculty: Peter Gilbert (BS ’92, MS ’94, PhD ’96); Paul Edlefsen, Youyi Fong (PhD ’10), Ying Huang (PhD ’07)
• FHCRC Vaccine and Infectious Disease faculty: Zoe Moodie (MS ’99, PhD ’01), Michal Juraska (MS ’09, PhD ’12)
• Joint UW Statistics/FHCRC faculty: Alex Luedtke
• UW Statistics graduate: Ted Westling (PhD ’18)