The project
Patients with HPV-positive throat cancer are usually treated with radiotherapy or chemoradiotherapy. After treatment, they return regularly for follow-up visits to check whether the disease has recurred. This happens in about 10–15% of patients. Despite this intensive follow-up, many recurrences are detected too late, making curative surgery no longer possible.
Liquid biopsy is a promising new way to detect cancer recurrence. It is a non-invasive test and therefore suitable for intensive follow-up. This may allow recurrences to be identified earlier, at a stage when curative treatment is still possible. In this project, you will use decision models to investigate which follow-up strategy incorporating liquid biopsies is the most efficient.
Under the supervision of Prof. Veerle Coupé and Dr. Marjolein Greuter, you will first analyze data from a clinical study to determine the accuracy of the liquid biopsy test (sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value). You will also examine how liquid biopsy results relate to the actual occurrence and timing of recurrence. This will allow us to determine how much earlier a liquid biopsy can detect recurrence compared to current follow-up methods.
The results of these analyses will be used to develop a decision-analytic model that simulates the course of the disease after initial treatment. Using this model, you will compare the effects of different follow-up strategies involving liquid biopsies on survival, costs, and cost-effectiveness with current practice, in order to identify the optimal strategy.
About your role
Your main tasks as a PhD candidate are:
- analyzing how well liquid biopsy can detect cancer recurrence;
- building and programming a decision-analytic model in R, incorporating data on quality of life and costs;
- evaluating multiple follow-up strategies using liquid biopsy for HPV-positive throat cancer;
- writing articles for international journals (biomedical, health economic, and/or epidemiological);
- writing and defending your PhD thesis at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam;
- contributing to teaching activities, including biostatistics courses for medical students.
About you
We are looking for someone with the following qualifications:
- you have (or will soon complete) an MSc in health economics, health sciences, epidemiology, statistics, or a related field;
- you have programming skills, preferably in R;
- you have experience with (applied) statistics, for example regression models and survival analysis;
- you have an interest in medicine, biomedical research, and/or public health;
- you communicate clearly, work in a structured way, and are able to maintain a good overview;
- you enjoy working in a multidisciplinary team (including epidemiologists, qualitative researchers, medical specialists, and policymakers).