Alessio Crippa

Alessio Crippa

Senior Research Specialist
Telephone: +46852482264
Visiting address: Nobels väg 12a, 17165 Solna
Postal address: C8 Medicinsk epidemiologi och biostatistik, C8 MEB Eklund, 171 77 Stockholm
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About me

  • I am a postdoctoral researcher in Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics (MEB) at Karolinska Institutet (KI). I did all my undergraduate studies in Biostatistics at the University of Milan-Bicocca, a part from a six-semester stint at the Stockholm University where I studied Mathematical Statistics, and a six-semester stint at KI where I wrote my master thesis. I also did my Phd at Karolinska Institutet focusing on the development of novel methods for dose-response meta-analysis, with several applications to lifestyle factors and cancer. During my PhD, I spent three months in Boston at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health under the supervision of Prof. Donna Spiegelman. Since 2018, I work at MEB as postdoctoral researcher, where my research focuses on the design and analysis of modern trials to reduce the prostate cancer mortality by using genetics biomarkers to individualized treatment decision.

    EDUCATION
    PhD Medical Science, Karolinska Institutet, 2018
    MSc Biostatistics and Experimental Statistics, University of Milan-Bicocca 2013
    BSc Statistics and Information Management, University of Milan-Bicocca 2011

Research

  • My research focuses on the development of methodologies within modern platform trials, with the aim of improving a personalized treatment decision for prostate cancer patients. I am the responsible for the statistical analysis plan, as well as the unblinded statistician, in the ProBio platform trial.

    ProBio

    Approximately 30% of men diagnosed with prostate cancer develop lethal metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC). Although recently approved new drugs are beneficial for many mCRPC patients they carry three serious disadvantages. First, these drugs are all very expensive. Second, the response rates to these drugs are low, ranging between 20-40%. This leads to suboptimal treatment and unnecessary side-effects. Third, there are no predictive treatment markers available in clinical care today, which leads to ineffective trial-and-error in treatment decisions. Our hypothesis is that treatment decisions based on molecular profiling will significantly increase progression free survival compared to current clinical care. The vast majority of CRPC metastasize to the bone, with low success rate in obtaining sufficient material. Therefore, we will sequence circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) consisting of DNA debris from apoptotic cancer being present at high levels in plasma. This hypothesis will be tested in the ProBio trial starting in the end of 2018, a large, nationwide, multicentre randomized study in men with CRPC. ProBio uses an outcome-adaptive randomization trial design, with the goal to learn as rapidly as possible which treatments are effective for which ctDNA biomarker profiles.

Teaching

  • I have been teaching courses in Biostatistics (Basic Statistics and Advanced Statistics in Epidemiology) in the Master program in Public Health at Karolinska Insitutet. I've also been teaching assistant in different courses in Epidemiology and Biostatistics (Introduction to Stata, Biostatistics II) in the Doctoral Program in Epidemiology, as well hold different workshops to introduce the statistical software R to public health researchers at Karolinska Institutet and medical doctors at Uppsala Hospital. I regularly have seminars teaching statistical concepts survival analysis for students in the Master of Biostatistics and Experimental Statistics at the University of Milan-Bicocca.

Articles

All other publications

Grants

  • Swedish Research Council
    1 January 2022 - 31 December 2025
    The lack of treatment-predictive biomarkers is an unmet clinical need in metastatic prostate cancer leading to inferior clinical outcomes, overtreatment and accelerating costs. The ProBio study (NCT03903835) is an ongoing randomized trial that builds on a novel adaptive study design and prospectively evaluates treatment predictive biomarker signatures in a large network of over 35 study centers in Europe. By using ProBio we will be able to rapidly evaluate both new and old drugs in subsets of patients with similar genomic biomarker. If successful, patients with prostate cancer will get individualized treatment based on treatment-predictive genomic biomarker signatures in the near future.To test this hypothesis, we will use a multiphase randomized study using an outcome-adaptive multi-arm biomarker-driven study design. We have the following main aims: To investigate if treatment decisions based on a biomarker signature identified by sequencing circulating tumor DNA improves progression free survival (primary endpoint)To ultimately show that the ProBio concept is a model for collaboration between academia and industry in the evaluation of new drugs in prostate cancer

Employments

  • Senior Research Specialist, Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institutet, 2022-

Degrees and Education

  • Degree Of Doctor Of Philosophy, Department of Global Public Health, Karolinska Institutet, 2018

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