Yale University-Mayo Clinic CERSI

Project Title: Bone Disease Modifying Agents in Multiple Myeloma: An Updated Systematic Review and Network Meta-Analysis

Dr. Cheng serves as an Associate Research Scientist and is a member of the Biostatistics Shared Resources (BSR) team of the Yale Cancer Center and a reviewer of its Protocol Review Committee. His expertise and research interests include: clinical trials methodology, clinical research based on electronic health records, systematic reviews & evidence synthesis methods (e.g. network meta-analysis, diagnostic/prognostic accuracy reviews), generalized linear mixed models (e.g. usage in count data modeling, repeated measures, and cluster randomized trials), Bayesian approaches to health-care evaluation (e.g. hierarchical models, simultaneous evidence synthesis and cost-effectiveness modeling), etc.

Project Title: Labeling of AI/ML-Based Software to Enable Transparency and Trust and to Address Ethical Concerns in Cardiovascular Care

Maryam Mooghali is a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale/YNHH Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE). She obtained her MD degree at Shiraz University of Medical Sciences in 2018. She soon realized the existing challenges and inefficiencies in health care delivery and decided to expand her knowledge in health informatics and explore digital health solutions for improving patient care. Thus, she moved to Canada in 2019 to pursue a Master’s degree in eHealth at McMaster University. Subsequently, she joined the Value and Evidence team at EVERSANA to focus on the clinical value and cost-effectiveness of novel pharmacological therapies and medical devices through conducting systematic literature reviews, meta-analyses, mixed treatment comparisons, and cost-effectiveness analyses. Evaluating the existing challenges in healthcare delivery and finding feasible cost-effective solutions are Maryam's main passions. She is interested in exploring the regulatory process and clinical adoption of pharmaceuticals and medical devices in the U.S.

Project Title: Bone Disease Modifying Agents in Multiple Myeloma: An Updated Systematic Review and Network Meta-Analysis

Dr. Alana Munger is a Chief Resident Physician of the Department of Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation. Following her residency training, she will be pursuing a musculoskeletal oncology fellowship at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. She is interested in clinical research, including clinical trials, within the field of orthopaedic oncology. In addition to her clinical and research endeavors, Dr. Munger also created and is the current host of the She Can Fix It Podcast - a podcast that highlights and empowers the women of orthopaedic surgery. Dr. Munger’s CERSI Scholars Program aims to perform an updated systematic review and network meta-analysis to determine which bone disease-modifying agent is associated with better outcomes in patients with multiple myeloma.

Project Title: A machine learning, phenomapping strategy for adaptive predictive enrichment in randomized controlled trials

Evangelos is a clinical fellow in cardiovascular medicine and a member of the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) Physician-Scientist Research Pathway at Yale School of Medicine. He obtained his medical degree from the University of Athens in Greece and subsequently completed a PhD in Medical Sciences at the University of Oxford. At Yale, Evangelos has joined the Cardiovascular Data Science (CarDS) lab (led by Rohan Khera, MD, MS). His most recent work describes a data-driven algorithm to detect personalized treatment effect signatures in randomized controlled trials. Evangelos’ CERSI project aims to test the feasibility, effectiveness, and safety of implementing this approach for the predictive enrichment of adaptive clinical trials through machine learning-guided phenomapping. This will assess a new paradigm for the design of more efficient randomized controlled trials, maximizing inference and minimizing the risk for trial participants.

Project Title: Assessment of Financial Disclosures on Viewer Perceptions of Safety and Effectiveness of Pharmaceutical Products Advertised in Social Media

Neeraj Patel is a medical student at Yale School of Medicine interested in studying regulations concerning the approval, affordability, and advertising of medical products. His CERSI scholar project aims to study the extent to which certain disclosures in social media pharmaceutical advertisements influence viewer perceptions of those ads. The proposed study has the potential to help policymakers and regulators develop evidence-based regulations to mitigate potential harms associated with industry-sponsored pharmaceutical marketing.

Project Title: Systemic Review of Research Studies that Examined the Reliability of a Surrogate Endpoint as Compared to a Clinical Outcome Measure in Chronic Diseases

Sam Yoon is a medical student at the Yale School of Medicine. His research interests broadly include clinical trial design, regulation of therapeutics, and the incentives that drive biomedical innovation. His CERSI Scholars project seeks to evaluate the evidence surrounding the use of surrogate endpoints as predictors of clinical outcomes in chronic diseases.

Project Title: Concordance of Drug Approvals for Factor Xa Inhibitors Across Major Regulatory Agencies

Tianna‘s interests include neurology and health policy. She majored in neuroscience and was a Global Health Scholar at Yale College. Prior to medical school, she conducted cardiovascular epidemiology and health services research at the Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE). Her CERSI Scholars project compares drug approvals across major regulatory agencies, including the FDA as well as agencies in Australia, Canada, and Europe.

Project Title: Examining Patient and Physician Preferences for Pharmacogenomic Testing in Psychiatry: A discrete choice experiment analysis

Dr. Kelleher is a Research Fellow in health economics at the Kern Center for the Science of Health Care Delivery at Mayo Clinic (Rochester, Minnesota). Dr. Kelleher’s research focus is on preference elicitation using stated preference techniques and applying these methods to different areas of research within Mayo Clinic. Dr. Kelleher has a keen research interest in how patient, physician and public preferences can be formally incorporated into policymaking. Dr. Kelleher has extensive experience is conducting stated preferences research studies including study design, completing research interviews with study participants, data analysis and publishing manuscripts. Dr. Kelleher has a PhD in health economics from University of Galway (Galway, Ireland) and he conducted his PhD research with the EuroQol Research Foundation (Rotterdam, The Netherlands). Dr Kelleher also has an MPH in health policy from Yale University. Dr. Kelleher’s CERSI project will examine patient and physician preferences for pharmacogenomic testing in psychiatry at Mayo Clinic.

Project Title: Develop anti-senescence therapies for Anthracycline-Induced Cardiotoxicity via Zebrafish Genetics

Maryam Moossavi is Research Fellow at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. She is working on anthracycline induced cardiotoxicity in zebrafish model and trying to find new modifier genes through MMEJ in F0 adult zebrafish. She is interested in transcriptomics analysis to find differentiated expressed genes in AIC. This foundation can be considered in exploring novel molecules and pathways related to AIC in precision medicine.

Project Title: Physicians’ Attitudes about Clinical Implementation of Pharmacogenomics

Julia Zhu is a research associate in the Knowledge Synthesis Unit at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Her research interests include understanding and developing individualized medicine from multiple aspects such as patient outcome evaluation and prediction, economic evaluation, and policy analysis using population-level data and simulation methods. The ultimate goal of her work is to optimize clinical decision-making, disease outcomes, and patient quality of life. Her primary research currently focuses on the clinical implementation of pharmacogenomics. Her CERSI Scholar project aims to understand the physicians’ opinions on the clinical use of pharmacogenomics and explore the potential opportunities and identify the potential barriers of this field.