More maths, fewer mice: web tool helps reduce lab animal use

In clinical efficacy trials for medical treatments, mathematical corrections are often used during the course of the study to optimise the number of participating patients. In earlier stages of research, involving laboratory animals, such mathematical corrections are not yet common.However, they could help reduce the number of animal experiments and thus the number of laboratory animals required.Research at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel by PhD candidate Susanne Blotwijk, attached to Professor Kurt Barbé's Biostatistics and Medical Informatics research group, is now making this possible. Intermediate or interim analyses have been used in clinical trials for decades. Additional analyses are often performed to improve the quality of the original experiment design. Investigating whether a treatment works can sometimes take years. Researcher Susanne Blotwijk puts the problem into focus: "If it is clear before the end of the study that a treatment works, how ethical is it to deny people outside the study access to this treatment? Conversely, if it's clear that it doesn't work, how can you justify recruiting even more patients for your research?" Of course, changing the experiment design should not be done lightly and requires mathematical corrections to ensure the results and conclusions remain reliable. These corrections are being made in clinical trials.