Clinical trials have two purposes -- to treat the patients in the trial, and to obtain information which increases our understanding of the disease and especially how patients respond to treatment. Statistical design provides a means to achieve both these aims, while statistical data analysis provides methods for extracting useful information from the trial data.
Recent advances in statistical computing have enabled statisticians to implement very rapidly a broad array of methods which previously were either impractical or impossible. Biostatisticians are now able to provide much...