Question: What is a Meta-Analysis
You hear it all the time in business: The meta-analysis reveals that this or that process is working. So you get the idea meta-analysis is some kind of assessment, but what exactly does it mean in the biotech industry?
Answer: A meta-analysis is a statistical analysis of several sets of data that all measure the same (or related) parameters, even if those measurements are taken using different instruments. In the biomedical industry, an example of a meta-analysis would be to summarize the data (called the meta-data) from several Phase III drug trials performed in several different countries. The analysis reports results in terms of effect size, thereby converting the findings from different studies into a normalized value for comparison between them.