Colin Begg

The conduct of clinical trials has become increasingly a global enterprise. However, regulation of trials is still largely organized on a regional basis. Thus it matters, from the perspective of the credibility of the results, where a specific trial of interest was conducted.

The COVID-19 pandemic arrived very suddenly and presented an immediate challenge to the clinical trials community. How should clinical research into treatments and prevention strategies be organized and conducted for a fast-moving, global pandemic?

Abstract To date, the vast preponderance of somatic variants observed in the cancer genome have been rare variants, and it is common in practice to encounter in a new tumor variants that have not been observed previously. Here we focus on probability estimation for encountering such hitherto unseen variants. We draw upon statistical methodology that has been developed in other fields of study, notably in species estimation in ecology, and word frequency estimation in computational linguistics.