Dear all, quick reminder that this afternoon, at 15:30, the SIB and the CIG will host statistician Stephen Senn (Head of Competence Center for Methodology and Statistics (CCMS), Luxembourg Institute of Health) who will talk about: Is Precision Medicine Terminally Ill? The presentation will take place in Auditoire A of the Génopode Building, on the Dorigny campus of the University of Lausanne. The presentation will be broadcast live at https://collab.switch.ch/sib-cbss/ It will also be available later on the SIB Youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPo4ED_WAKjwQ878cca6_oQ Hope to see you there ! Frédéric Abstract: For at least twenty years we have been promised that a revolution in medical care, based mainly on genomics, but also on various other 'omics', is imminent. Precise diagnosis will be matched by tailor-made medicine and put an end to mass solutions doled out to crudely assembled disease groups. In those 20 years, the relevant vocabulary has been reinvented several times moving from personalized, to precision to high-definition medicine. However, despite some notable successes the theranostic revolution has not taken place and the reality continues to fall far short of the promise. I shall argue that one reason is that clinical trials are regularly misunderstood and all too frequently badly analysed. In particular, an obsession with numbers needed to treat based on arbitrary dichotomies has exaggerated the extent to which patients differ in response and hence the scope for personalising therapies. I shall suggest that smarter design and analysis of trial is needed and that it is quite probable that the scope for personalised medicine is less than commonly supposed. The main task for drug development will remain finding treatments that are good on average. ---