Internship in Innovation & Sustainability - Innovative Bayesian Clinical Trial Design

At Roche you can show up as yourself, embraced for the unique qualities you bring. Our culture encourages personal expression, open dialogue, and genuine connections,  where you are valued, accepted and respected for who you are, allowing you to thrive both personally and professionally. This is how we aim to prevent, stop and cure diseases and ensure everyone has access to healthcare today and for generations to come. Join Roche, where every voice matters.

The Position

A healthier future. It’s what drives us to innovate. To continuously advance science and ensure everyone has access to the healthcare they need today and for generations to come. Creating a world where we all have more time with the people we love.  That’s what makes us Roche.

Our Global Internship Programme in Innovation & Sustainability (#IP2TIS) offers a unique opportunity for passionate individuals to gain hands-on experience in the pharmaceutical industry while making a positive impact on the world.

Are you ready to join a global network spanning 20+ countries, where bright minds collaborate to tackle real-world challenges in Innovation & Sustainability? Do you want to work on impactful projects, shape the future, and drive change from within?

The Position

As an intern, you will contribute to a strategic project evaluating Bayesian methods for China clinical development plan, with a focus on evaluating regional consistency in MRCT and standalone bridging trial settings. The project aims to assess how Bayesian approaches can support more efficient development by borrowing strength from external data, reducing local data burden, and helping teams make more informed design and analysis decisions. Within your first 3 months, you are expected to help deliver a targeted methodology review, define representative use cases, build a reusable R-based computational framework, run simulation studies, and contribute to a technical reference document for the PD China team. Your work will support Roche’s Access to Innovation priority by helping accelerate patient access to innovative medicines while improving clinical development efficiency and reducing unnecessary trial burden. This internship offers a unique opportunity to apply advanced Bayesian statistics in a highly relevant regulatory and strategic context with direct impact on regional development decisions.

The Opportunity

• Conduct a targeted literature review of Bayesian methods for bridging design and subpopulation analysis, including approaches such as Bayesian hierarchical models, MAP priors, and power priors.

• Define representative use cases for evaluating regional consistency in China subpopulations within MRCTs and in standalone China bridging trials.

• Develop a modular R package or structured set of functions that implements relevant Bayesian methods in a reusable and scalable way.

• Execute systematic simulation studies to compare operating characteristics of Bayesian and frequentist methods, such as power, type I error, false positive rate, and effective sample size.

• Explore and test candidate Bayesian success criteria for regional consistency across different endpoint types, disease areas, and effect sizes.

• Evaluate opportunities for sample size optimization and more efficient regional clinical development plan.

• Present findings to the Data Science team and contribute to a technical report that supports future cross-functional evaluation and decision-making.

• Support the development of strategic guidance on when and how Bayesian methods can be applied in regional clinical development.

Who You Are

You are enrolled in your PhD studies at a university, preferably in the field of Biostatistics, Applied Statistics, Medical Statistics, Mathematics, or Statistics and are interested in applying your knowledge in a modern working environment as part of an internship of 3 months.

Furthermore you are

• Strong in biostatistics, Bayesian statistics, and statistical programming in R.

• Familiar with clinical trial methodology and interested in applying advanced statistical methods in drug development.

• Able to translate methodological questions into structured simulation plans and practical analytical tools.

• A proactive problem solver with a strong sense of project ownership.

• Fluent in both Chinese and English and comfortable communicating with technical stakeholders.

If you meet most but not all qualifications, we still encourage you to apply.

Additional information

The internship is expected to start between 1 and 16 July 2026 and will last 3 months.

For more information about IP2TIS and to explore other opportunities within the programme, please visit go.roche.com/ip2tis_26

Who we are

A healthier future drives us to innovate. Together, more than 100’000 employees across the globe are dedicated to advance science, ensuring everyone has access to healthcare today and for generations to come. Our efforts result in more than 26 million people treated with our medicines and over 30 billion tests conducted using our Diagnostics products. We empower each other to explore new possibilities, foster creativity, and keep our ambitions high, so we can deliver life-changing healthcare solutions that make a global impact.

Let’s build a healthier future, together.

Roche is an Equal Opportunity Employer.