Dr. Xikui Wang
Assistant professor of biostatistics
Dr. Xikui Wang has a particular interest in the design of clinical trials, especially ethical considerations in treatment allocations. The standard procedure in a clinical trial is to give treatments to two equally divided groups of patients. "Unless they are equally effective, we know that one treatment is superior and one inferior. By giving half the patients the inferior treatment, we are afraid we're not being ethical to those patients. We know we have to sacrifice some patients to get a scientific evaluation, but the question is: Do we sacrifice too much?"
Dr. Wang believes that an adaptive design of the trial should be used so that
the maximum number of patients can be put on the superior treatment, while still allowing
the trial to reach a valid conclusion. He's working on a statistical model for this, but
it is not yet ready to be put into practice. He will be working on clinical trials in
Newfoundland as part of the team in the Cancer Clinic.
Dr. Wang came to Memorial from the University of Alberta, where he taught statistics and biostatistics for more than three years. He earned a doctorate in statistics and a master's in mathematics from the University of Saskatchewan, and his B.Sc. in mathematics at the Central China Normal University. Since 1996 he has served as a consultant and biostatistician to PharmaTEC Global Inc. in Edmonton, Alberta.
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