Andrew Nunn joined the MRC’s Tuberculosis & Chest Diseases Unit as a statistician in 1966. During the next 20 years he was directly involved in the design, conduct and analysis of the programme of trials conducted under the leadership of Professors Wallace Fox and Denny Mitchison in East Africa, Hong Kong and Singapore which led to the worldwide adoption of short course chemotherapy for tuberculosis. Following the closure of that unit he joined the MRC’s Uganda AIDS Programme which researched the dynamics of the HIV epidemic in a rural African environment. On his return to the UK he became head of the Division Without Portfolio within the newly formed MRC Clinical Trials Unit with responsibility for developing trials in neglected areas. Andrew is Co-Chief Investigator of STREAM, the first randomised controlled-trial of a treatment regimen for multi-drug resistant TB. In the context of treatment guidelines based on ‘very low quality’ evidence, Andrew designed STREAM to generate gold-standard evidence on the safety and efficacy of the promising 9-month short-course regimen previously evaluated only in observational studies. The trial has subsequently been adapted to test a bedaquiline-containing oral regimen.

MRC CTU Podcasts

Andrew Nunn talks Medical Statistics, TB, and Algerian Nomads (Part 2)

Andrew Nunn talks Medical Statistics, TB, and Algerian Nomads (Part 1)

Jayne Tierney has been a Research Scientist at the Unit since it was formed in 1999, and prior to that, in the Cancer Trials Office in Cambridge. For more than 20 years, she has been responsible for designing and conducting systematic reviews and meta-analyses to rigorously re-evaluate the effectiveness of therapies; projects that have influenced practice guidelines and the treatment of patients worldwide. Today we discuss Jayne's career in depth, improving systematic reviews, and how to stand out as an individual when the work you do is mostly collaborative.

Jayne Tierney talks Systematic Reviews, Impact, and Fish Parasites...

Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) bacteraemia is a common infection worldwide, with mortality rates of around 20%, but little research has been done on how best to treat it. This episode explores the results of the ARREST trial, which looked at adding rifampicin to standard antistaphylococcal antibiotic treatment. This is the short version of the recording. A longer version is available on the MRC CTU SoundCloud.

ARREST: rifampicin for Staph. aureus bacteraemia (short version)

Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) bacteraemia is a common infection worldwide, with mortality rates of around 20%, but little research has been done on how best to treat it. This episode explores the results of the ARREST trial, which looked at adding rifampicin to standard antistaphylococcal antibiotic treatment.

ARREST: rifampicin for Staph. aureus bacteraemia (full length)

Back in January 2017, Professor Patrick Royston was awarded the Stata Journal Editors’ Prize 2016, for his significant contributions to Stata and the Stata community over the last 25 years, and for three papers he published in the Stata Journal during the previous two years. Today, Patrick will officially receive his award at 2017 London Stata Users Group meeting in London. To commemorate this occasion, we have interviewed Patrick for the first podcast in our new series 'MRCCTU: The Ideas Behind the Trials’. The interview explores Patrick's career in more depth, and provides an insight into his work with Stata, including fractional polynomials, and survival analysis “beyond the Cox model”. There is also some excellent advice for younger statisticians just starting out in the field. Click the link below to listen to the podcast.

Patrick Royston Receives The Stata Journal Editors' Prize 2016

Podcast by MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL

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MRC CTU Podcasts

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