You stole my idea!

Earlier today, Gareth has showed me a recent, interesting paper by Michael Sweeting (and colleagues). In the paper, Micheal et al describe their work on a R package to extend on the framework of the Continual Reassessment Method (the original paper by John O'Quigley and colleagues is here), which is a particular design that can be used in dose-finding studies.

No one has really stolen anything (just to be clear!) but I did have the same idea just a couple of months ago $-$ Gareth was working on a similar problem and asked me to have a chat about how one can apply the CRM, which is essentially a Bayesian method.

In its standard form, essentially, the CRM uses a very simple model based on very simple priors (typically exponentials or Gamma). While we were discussing it, I thought it would be nice to expand this and may be make a package that would link to JAGS or BUGS and allow you to select the prior from a wider range. Which, as it turns out, is just what Michael et al have done! 

Well $-$ at least I can see that was a good idea!