How can biostatistics inform pharmaceutical research?

Answer 1

Biostatistics can help us determine whether or not a drug is having desired effects throughout all stages of development. Specifically, during the human trial portion of testing, Biostatistics methods can help us:

1. Calculate how many people should be assigned to each group (treatment / control)
2. Determine the minimum effective dose
3. End the trial early if we detect high efficacy of the medication or an unacceptable level of negative side effects

If you are interested in learning more about this topic, I would suggest looking up the following terms: clinical trial sample size, Bayesian clinical trials, and clinical trial effective dose

This article also outlines the role of a statistician in a clinical trial: https://plus.maths.org/content/pharmaceutical-statistics