This project is in collaboration with the joint School of Medicine/ADAPT health research project called PARADISE. ANCA Vasculitis is a rare auto-immune disease in which sufferers are susceptible to flares, whereby a person’s immune system attacks their own body. Treating people with vasculitis is difficult, because the most successful treatments, such as rituximab, have significant side effects. This means that clinicians must balance the risk of disease relapse, whereby the patient will experience another flare, against the negative side effects that they will experience whenever they receive another treatment dose.
The goal of this project will be to analyse data extracted from the Rare Kidney Disease Registry (RKD) in order to identify patients who are at low and high risk of disease relapse following treatment discontinuation, i.e., those patients who have stopped receiving treatment. Data consist of several biomarkers measuring disease activity and other clinical variables such as age, gender, etc. Survival analysis models will be applied to the data to assess risk of relapse.
This project would be suitable for a student with strong statistics and data analysis skills, and an interest in health and in engaging with the biology underlying the dataset being analysed. No prior knowledge of survival analysis is needed, but any existing knowledge will be helpful. Good communication skills would also be helpful. The student will be supported by me and by various members of the PARADISE team.
Click here for background reading: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/arthur.white/Teaching/McClure-Relapse-2020.pdf. This piece is a recent example of our team’s success modeling vasculitis: https://www.adaptcentre.ie/news-and-events/ai-powered-research-revolutionises-understanding-of-autoimmune-disease/