Research Associate - Pharmacoepidemiology and Causal Inference

at  The University of Manchester

Immune-mediated inflammatory diseases (IMIDs) include conditions affecting the skin, joints, and/or the gut. They lead to a big burden on the body and mind for 7% of people globally. New high-cost treatments that target inflammation-controlling proteins have transformed the lives of people with IMIDs. When deciding whether to take these treatments, patients and their doctors rely on evidence. This includes information from randomized controlled trials (RCTs), where two or more different medicines, of which one may be a dummy medicine, are given randomly to groups of participants. There are also observational studies, where large groups of people are observed in routine settings without being allocated medicines. Observational studies are representative, large, and relatively cheap but can be biased. RCTs are more reliable but people from underserved populations, such as people from lower socio-economic backgrounds, are often excluded or under-represented. Only using evidence from RCTs to guide treatment decisions could introduce privileges or disadvantages for different groups of people, leading to an overestimation of benefits and an underestimation of risks overall.
This project, entitled “Mastering Effectiveness Research by Meta-Analysing Trial and Real World Evidence in Immune-mediated inflammatory Diseases (MERMAID)”, aims to use RCTs and observational studies together to find better ways of using current IMID treatments and test treatment effects in underserved populations.

Please refer the Job description for details