Dear all, The next seminar in our series of statistics talks for people interested in quantitative methods in biology and medicine will take place on Wednesday 22 November 2017, 15:30, in Auditoire A of the Génopode Building (Dorigny campus). The speaker will be Stephen Senn (Head of Competence Center for Methodology and Statistics (CCMS), Luxembourg Institute of Health) Title: Is Precision Medicine Terminally Ill? 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. --- Hope to see you there! Frédéric