Related papers: Post-randomization Biomarker Effect Modification i…
Studies of HPV vaccine efficacy usually record infections with vaccine targeted and nontargeted strains. Contrary to blinded randomized controlled trials, confounding bias can be a threat and risk compensation may occur in observational…
Understanding vaccine effects on post-infection outcomes is critical for evaluating the full value proposition of a vaccine. However, defining appropriate causal effects on such outcomes is challenging because infection is affected by…
Suppose one wishes to estimate the effect of a binary treatment on a binary endpoint conditional on a post-randomization quantity in a counterfactual world in which all subjects received treatment. It is generally difficult to identify this…
In order to meet regulatory approval, pharmaceutical companies often must demonstrate that new vaccines reduce the total risk of a post-infection outcome like transmission, symptomatic disease, severe illness, or death in randomized,…
The advent and subsequent widespread availability of preventive vaccines has altered the course of public health over the past century. Despite this success, effective vaccines to prevent many high-burden diseases, including HIV, have been…
A key objective in two phase 2b AMP clinical trials of VRC01 is to evaluate whether drug concentration over time, as estimated by non-linear mixed effects pharmacokinetics (PK) models, is associated with HIV infection rate. We conducted a…
We review standard mediation assumptions as they apply to identifying antibody effects in a randomized vaccine trial and propose new study designs to allow identification of an estimand that was previously unidentifiable. For these…
Cross-sectional incidence estimation based on recency testing has become a widely used tool in HIV research. Recently, this method has gained prominence in HIV prevention trials to estimate the "placebo" incidence that participants might…
Safe and effective preventive vaccines have the potential to help stem the HIV epidemic. The efficacy of such vaccines is typically measured in randomized, double-blind phase IIb/III trials and described as a reduction in newly acquired HIV…
Understanding waning of vaccine-induced protection is important for both immunology and public health. Population heterogeneities in underlying (pre-vaccination) susceptibility and vaccine response can cause measured vaccine effectiveness…
In vaccine studies for infectious diseases such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the frequency and type of contacts between study participants and infectious sources are among the most informative risk factors, but are often not…
Randomization inference is a powerful tool in early phase vaccine trials when estimating the causal effect of a regimen against a placebo or another regimen. Randomization-based inference often focuses on testing either Fisher's sharp null…
Causal indirect and direct effects provide an interpretable method for decomposing the total effect of an exposure on an outcome into the effect through a mediator and the effect through all other pathways. When the mediator is a biomarker,…
Studies of vaccine efficacy often record both the incidence of vaccine-targeted virus strains (primary outcome) and the incidence of non-targeted strains (secondary outcome). However, standard estimates of vaccine efficacy on targeted…
When assessing the causal effect of a binary exposure using observational data, confounder imbalance across exposure arms must be addressed. Matching methods, including propensity score-based matching, can be used to deconfound the causal…
Cross-sectional HIV incidence estimation leverages recency test results to determine the HIV incidence of a population of interest, where recency test uses biomarker profiles to infer whether an HIV-positive individual was "recently"…
Evaluating causal effects in the presence of interference is challenging in network-based studies of hard-to-reach populations. Like many such populations, people who inject drugs (PWID) are embedded in social networks and often exert…
Pathogens usually exist in heterogeneous variants, like subtypes and strains. Quantifying treatment effects on the different variants is important for guiding prevention policies and treatment development. Here we ground analyses of…
Longitudinal cohorts to determine the incidence of HIV infection are logistically challenging, so researchers have sought alternative strategies. Recency test methods use biomarker profiles of HIV-infected subjects in a cross-sectional…
Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is an effective intervention for preventing HIV transmission, but high cost and uneven uptake raise challenges for resource allocation. While spillover effects, wherein PrEP use in one group reduces…