Post-Doctoral Research Visit F/M Causal inference and mechanistic digital twins for individualized adjuvant treatment in resected lung cancer

Two-year postdoctoral position funded by the RHU LUCA-pi project (France 2030) on personalised medicine in early-stage non-small cell lung cancer, which brings together clinical, biological and computational partners around a large retrospective cohort (LUCA-pi RETRO) and a prospective cohort of surgically treated patients. The postdoc joins the COMPO team (Computational Pharmacology and Clinical Oncology; Inria, Inserm, Aix-Marseille Université) at the Cancer Research Center of Marseille, which is building a mechanistic model of metastatic relapse, a digital twin predicting each patient’s risk of relapse after surgery.

Because adjuvant chemotherapy, immunotherapy and targeted therapy are prescribed on clinical criteria, their real-world effect is obscured by confounding by indication, immortal-time bias and lack of positivity. The project adds a causal layer to the digital twin: on the applied side, estimating the causal effect of adjuvant treatment on metastatic relapse by emulating a target trial on LUCA-pi RETRO (clone-censor-weighting; risk differences and restricted mean survival time with competing risks), with average effects from AIPW/TMLE, heterogeneous effects from causal survival forests and meta-learners, and comparison with the LACE, IMpower010 and ADAURA trials; on the methodological side, connecting causal inference with mechanistic modelling.

Start date 1 January 2027; gross salary €2,788 per month.