Dr Wei Hong presented 2025 TJ Martin Award You are here:HomeNewsroomNews Dr Wei Hong has been named this year’s recipient of the TJ Martin Award for his PhD thesis investigating a mathematical program aimed at improving the efficiency and accuracy of clinical trials in oncology. “In order to find new treatments for patients, we need to do research involving clinical trials,” said Dr Hong, a consultant medical oncologist at St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne (SVHM). “One of the biggest issues is that trials take years and involve hundreds of patients, and many still fail.” Dr Hong’s award-winning thesis, Bayesian adaptive clinical trials in medical oncology, investigated how the Bayesian adaptive trial design could be applied to clinical trials using probability modelling to potentially allow researchers to design more efficient and cost-effective trials. His research led to the development of a computer program that calculates the likelihood of a treatment’s success or failure during the course of a trial. The aim is to enable researchers to make earlier decisions about whether to continue or stop a trial, saving time, resources, and potentially accelerating access to life-saving treatments. “We developed a computer program that uses probability modelling to help design trials and predict outcomes,” he explained. “It can estimate how many patients are needed, suggest when to start or stop, and indicate whether a treatment is likely to succeed or fail, potentially even before the trial ends.” Dr Hong’s work bridges medicine, statistics and computing, and reflects a growing interest in modernising clinical trial design. The approach could potentially allow for greater flexibility in trial design, allowing researchers to adapt as new information emerges, something traditional trial structures currently don’t allow. “Most trials are set in stone from the start, and you get the result years later, whether the question is still relevant or not,” said Dr Hong. “The method we have investigated through this research would potentially let us change direction mid-trial, which is especially important in oncology where patients are racing against time.” While Dr Hong’s thesis focused on cancer research, he believes the methods could also be adapted to other types of clinical trials in different fields. Research honoured with prestigious accolade The TJ Martin Award is named in honour of Professor Jack Martin who was the Director of St Vincent’s Institute of Medical Research from 1988 to 2002 and contributed extensively to research on bone. “I feel honoured to have this research recognised with this award,” he said. “My dream is for these methods to be considered in every new trial that is designed and used in many of them.”