SISAQOL-IMI Receives the 2024 SPAIG Award

On Tuesday, August 6^th, 2024, SISAQOL-IMI (Setting International Standards in Analysing Patient-Reported Outcomes and Quality of Life Endpoints in Cancer Clinical Trials – IMI) was awarded the prestigious Statistical Partnerships Among Academe, Industry, and Government (SPAIG) Award by the American Statistical Association (ASA) at the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) in Portland, Oregon, USA.  As an international multidisciplinary consortium, SISOQOL-IMI brings together researchers from the pharmaceutical industry, academia, non-profit associations, cancer institutes, regulators, and patient advocacy organizations with the aim of generating recommendations to standardize the use, analysis, and interpretation of patient reported outcome (PRO) data in cancer clinical trials.  These recommendations will enhance the clarity, transparency, and consistency of PRO data from cancer clinical trials, ultimately helping healthcare providers, patients, researchers and policy makers make better-informed decisions considering the impact of treatment on patients’ lives.

The ASA is the world’s largest community of statisticians. Since it was founded in 1839, it has worked to promote excellence in the development, application, and dissemination of statistical science. As a part of this mission, the annual SPAIG award was established in 2002 to recognize exceptional collaborations between academia, industry, and government. Winning collaborations must have significantly contributed to the statistical field in a way that applies to real-world problems.

Other recent winners of the SPAIG award include a collaboration between researchers at UNC, Merck, and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the COVID-19 Multicountry Research Group (CovMRG; a collaboration between Harvard and Partners in Health), the Intermediate Clinical Endpoints of Prostate Cancer initiative (ICECaP; a collaboration between Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, National Cancer Institute, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Duke University, the University of Chicago, University College London, and the International Drug Development Institute [IDDI]), and the COVIDcast project (a collaboration between the Delphi research group at Carnegie Mellon University, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], Google, Facebook, Optum Technology, Change Healthcare, UnitedHealth Group, and Quidel, Inc.).