Question: What is one of the most challenging aspects of working in biopharmaceutical industry, especially when it comes to managing complex data?

Kathryn Howells answered on 3 Feb 2025:

For large clinical trials the volume of data that’s collected is usually the most challenging as there can be over 1000 patients and as I work on trials for a cancer treatment, the trials can last for over 5 years, with data collected on the patients every 12 to 24 weeks. Thus some of the data can be missing or dates can be captured with only the month and year, so we have to decide how best to handle this before we can even analyse the data. Luckily there is guidance available on how to deal with these kind of aspects within the industry and also within the company I work in and so there is always help and advice available. We also use SAS to analyse the data so no need to calculate anything by hand. The statistical analyses we use are pretty standard and again there are guidance documents available to help. I generally use survival analysis or you may have heard it called time to event analysis.