Conference on Methodology for Clinical Trials in Small Populations and Rare Diseases

A rare disease is defined to be one that effects less than one in 2,000 of the general population, though many are much less common than this, perhaps affecting only a handful of people in any country.

In such settings where numbers are scarce, the large clinical trials that are generally used to evaluate new drugs and other healthcare interventions are infeasible or often impossible. As a result, new approaches to the design of such studies, or improved methods of data analysis and subsequent decision-making, are needed. The InSPiRe (Innovation in Small Populations Research) project is a three-year EU-funded project focussing on the development of novel methodology in response to this need.

This conference will present key results from the InSPiRe project and bring together international experts in innovative clinical trial design and analysis to present recent advances in the methodology for clinical trials in small populations.

In addition to a series of plenary invited talks, the conference will include two pre-conference courses and poster presentations. All conference delegates are invited to submit an abstract for a poster presentation.

Bursaries waiving the conference registration fee will be awarded to the students submitting the best poster abstracts as judged by the conference organising committee.