Lab Updates - Q4 2025
Recent Highlights
The Rashid Lab had a productive Q4 2025, with major grant awards, new publications, and continued growth of our research program.
Major Grant Awards
ARPA-H ADAPT Platform Trial ($28M)
We are thrilled to announce our leadership role in the ARPA-H ADAPT platform trial for metastatic breast cancer, a transformative $28M award supporting the TBCRC Evolutionary Clinical Trial For Novel Biomarker-Driven Therapies (EvolveBDT). As Statistical Lead and Co-PI (with Lisa Carey and Chuck Perou), Dr. Rashid is designing a novel Bayesian adaptive clinical trial that will:
- Enroll individuals with metastatic breast cancer in the second-line setting
- Collect serial biomarker data (tissue, ctDNA, imaging)
- Use evolutionary trial design to integrate sensitivity and resistance biomarkers
- Apply real-time analytics to identify optimal treatment for every patient
This represents one of the largest adaptive trial awards in breast cancer and will run from 2025-2031. Read more →
DOD PCARP: AI for Clinical Trial Matching ($311K)
Our new Department of Defense Pancreatic Cancer Research Program award will develop fine-tuned large language models to enhance clinical trial discovery and enrollment for pancreatic cancer patients. This innovative project combines:
- Retrospective clinical data from UNC PDAC patients
- Trial data from clinicaltrials.gov
- Expert-curated patient-trial matches
- LLM fine-tuning for personalized recommendations
This work addresses a critical barrier to clinical trial access and builds on our lab’s expertise in precision oncology.
Recent Publications
Methodology
Heiling et al. (2025) published “Efficient computation of high-dimensional penalized piecewise constant hazard random effects survival models” in Statistics in Medicine (In Press). This work extends our glmmPen framework to survival outcomes with time-varying effects.
Lim et al. (2024) published two major papers on handling missing data:
- “Unsupervised imputation of non-ignorably missing data using importance-weighted autoencoders” in Statistics in Biopharmaceutical Research
- “Deeply learned generalized linear models with missing data” in Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics
Both papers are now informing our ARPA-H ADAPT trial analytics for handling incomplete EHR data.
Collaborative Research
Innocenti et al. (2024) published “DNA mutational profiling in patients with colorectal cancer treated with standard of care reveals differences in outcome and racial distribution of mutations” in Journal of Clinical Oncology 42(4):399-409. This Alliance cooperative group study demonstrates the impact of tumor mutational profiling in CRC outcomes.
Team Achievements
Grizzle Award
Dr. Rashid received the James E. Grizzle Distinguished Alumnus Award from the UNC Department of Biostatistics, recognizing leadership in adaptive oncology analytics, mentoring, and service to the Gillings Research Council. Read more →
PhD Student Progress
Amber Young presented her work on semi-supervised matrix factorization for pancreatic cancer subtyping at JSM 2025 in Nashville, winning a best poster award in the Statistical Genetics & Genomics section.
Tyler Humpherys (co-advised with Dr. Michael Kosorok) passed his preliminary examination and is advancing to PhD candidacy. His dissertation will focus on precision medicine and dynamic treatment regimes.
Alumni Updates
Euphy Wu, PhD successfully defended her dissertation in June 2024 on allele-specific expression and topic modeling approaches for multi-omic biomarker discovery. She is now a biostatistician at a leading precision genomics firm.
Software Releases
glmmPen v1.5.3
Hillary Heiling (now at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute) released an updated version of glmmPen with:
- Improved computational efficiency for large random effects structures
- Enhanced convergence diagnostics
- New vignettes for survival and count outcomes
- CRAN package
Upcoming Events
Spring 2026
- ENAR 2026 (March, Atlanta): Dr. Rashid will organize an invited session on “Adaptive Platform Trials in Oncology” featuring ARPA-H ADAPT investigators
- JSM 2026 (August, Philadelphia): Lab members will present recent work on missing data methods and cancer subtyping
- TBCRC Annual Meeting (May): Presenting ADAPT trial design and preliminary enrollment data
Collaborative Highlights
Our research continues to benefit from strong partnerships:
- UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center: Ongoing collaborations with Yeh, Carey, Perou, Vincent labs
- Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology: CALGB 80405 and CALGB 40603 analyses continue
- Translational Breast Cancer Research Consortium (TBCRC): Statistical leadership for ADAPT platform
- PDAC Stromal Reprogramming Consortium: Development of robust stromal subtyping methods
Join Us
We are recruiting PhD students for Fall 2026 admission interested in:
- Adaptive clinical trial design
- Statistical genomics and cancer subtyping
- Machine learning with missing data
- Precision medicine analytics
Prospective students: Contact naim@unc.edu for more information.