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BIOUNCERTAINTY - ERC Starting Grant no. 805498
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10th December 2020: Research seminar online - Adrian Stencel (IF UJ) with the co-author: Drug repurposing for COVID-19: The problem of excessive hypothesis testing
We have the pleasure to invite you for a research seminar in the ‘BIOUNCERTAINTY’ research project. The subject of the seminar is 'Drug repurposing for COVID-19: The problem of excessive hypothesis testing' and it will be delivered by Adrian Stencel (IF UJ) with the co-author. The seminar will take place on Thursday, 10th of December, at 5:30pm on MS Teams (link below).
Abstract: We are concerned with the problem of excessive hypothesis testing (multiple comparisons) in the field of the search for covid-19 treatment. The problem, in our opinion, is that the current strategy of searching for the treatment is going to produce numerous false positive results. Currently, there are over 2 thousand interventional clinical trials testing the efficacy of repurposed drugs (hydroxychloroquine and remdesivir are the most widely-known examples). We argue that the prior probability of hypotheses that these drugs will be effective is very low. Considering that the number of trials is extraordinary, the repetitive sampling of the population of COVID-19 cases will lead to observing dozens of trials reporting positive results despite no effect of the treatments under test. We argue that using mechanistic evidence to assess treatments' efficacy a priori and accounting for false discovery rate could limit the amount of conflicting evidence emerging in the field and save drag approval agencies from changing their recommendations.
Adrian Stencel works at the Institute of Philosophy of the Jagiellonian University. He is interested mainly in philosophy of biology, with strong interest in the conceptual and foundational issues surrounding the theory of evolution, population biology and microbiology.
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