Hua Xu, PhD, Robert T. McCluskey Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science at Yale School of Medicine, and his collaborators have been awarded an R01 grant from the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health for the project "Networked Trial Emulation Framework for Causal Effects of Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 Receptor Agonists on Mental Health Outcomes." The award totals about $4.1 million over five years. Xu serves as a multiple principal investigator, alongside contact principal investigator Yong Chen, PhD, professor of biostatistics and informatics at the University of Pennsylvania, and multiple principal investigator Jing-Mei Qiu, PhD, Unidel Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Delaware. The University of Pennsylvania leads the project, with consortium sites at Yale University and the University of Delaware.
GLP-1 receptor agonists are widely used for type II diabetes and obesity, but their effects on mental health are not well understood and are difficult to study, since real-world clinical data are prone to bias, incomplete medication records, and fragmentation across institutions. The team will develop a networked "trial emulation" framework that uses electronic health records to approximate a randomized trial, combining systematic-error correction, federated learning, natural language processing and tensor-train decomposition to generate reliable causal evidence while keeping patient data secure across sites.