Symposium 2: Target Trial Emulations in Neurology and Mental Health
Tracks
Track 2
| Saturday, October 31, 2026 |
| 10:30 - 12:00 |
| Lecture Theatre 1 |
Details
Neurological and mental health disorders are leading causes of disability worldwide and account for substantial healthcare utilization and societal burden. While randomised controlled trials remain the gold standard for evaluating treatment effects, they are often costly, time-consuming, or infeasible for many clinically relevant questions. Target trial emulation (TTE) has emerged as a rigorous framework for generating causal evidence from real-world data, providing new opportunities to evaluate treatment effectiveness and safety, inform clinical and policy decision-making, and identify drug repurposing opportunities in neurological and mental health research.
TTE is increasingly transforming pharmacoepidemiology by providing a structured approach to designing observational studies that emulate the key components of a hypothetical randomised trial. This symposium will showcase recent methodological advances and examples of TTE in neurological disorders and mental health, demonstrating how real-world data can be leveraged to address important clinical questions.
Professor Li Wei will introduce the symposium and provide an overview of the TTE framework. She will also discuss key findings from a recent review article on TTE for drug Repurposing in neurodegenerative diseases: opportunities, challenges, and practical guidance.
Research Fellow Daniel Tsai will present a case study on antipsychotic therapy and suicide risk in patients with treatment resistant depression, demonstrating how real-world data can be used to evaluate treatment strategies and important patient outcomes where randomised trial evidence is be limited.
Associate Professor Ruth Brauer will discuss the application of TTE to research hormone replacement therapy and women's health. Her presentation will highlight how TTE can help address complex questions regarding the benefits and risks of hormonal therapies and their implications for health outcomes across women's life stages.
Finally, Professor Olaf Klungel will present on the TARGET-EU initiative, a major European collaboration advancing the application, standardisation, and regulatory use of TTE. He will discuss methodological innovations, infrastructure development, and bridging the Estimand framework with TTE to strengthen real-world evidence generation for regulatory decision-making.
Together, these presentations will provide attendees with both methodological foundations and practical examples of TTE across diverse therapeutic areas.
By the end of this symposium, participants will be able to:
1) Describe the key principles and methodological components of target trial emulation in pharmacoepidemiology focusing on neurology and mental health.
2) Understand how TTE can be applied to evaluate treatment effectiveness, safety, and drug repurposing opportunities in neurological and mental health disorders.
Speaker
Miss. Qingke Demi He
Phd Candidate
Monash University
Symposium Moderator
Biography
Qingke “Demi” He, BPharm/MPharm, is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Medicine Use and Safety, Monash University. Her research focuses on the use and safety of GLP-1 receptor agonists, particularly in relation to dementia and Parkinson’s disease. She works with linked administrative health data and pharmacovigilance databases, with methodological interests in target trial emulation and tree-based scan statistics. Alongside her research, Demi also practises as a community pharmacist.
Dr George Tan
Monash University
Symposium Moderator
Biography
George Tan, BPharm (Hons), PhD is an Adjunct Research Fellow at the Centre for Medicine Use and Safety (CMUS), Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Monash University. George supports grant and contract-funded pharmacoepidemiology projects, as well as supervises PhD students. His primary research focus is on using real-world data to advance drug repurposing, particularly in implementing novel data-driven methodologies to generate drug-outcome signals, and using target trial emulation to validate candidate signals. Previously serving as a Research Fellow at CMUS, George managed data governance, ethics and access to large healthcare datasets hosted in CMUS. He is also part of the Neurological and Mental Health Global Epidemiology Network (NeuroGEN). Currently, he is a Market Access professional in a global medical technology company. George is also a practising pharmacist and serves as a Pharmacy Board of Australia examiner. George currently serves as the Chair of the Australasian Society of Clinical and Experimental Pharmacologists and Toxicologists Pharmacoepidemiology Special Interest Group, co-leading initiatives that build capacity and visibility of pharmacoepidemiology research in Australia.
Prof Li Wei
Head Of Department
UCL
Symposium Presenter
Biography
Professor Li Wei is Head of the Research Department of Practice and Policy at School of Pharmacy, University College London (UCL). She is an established researcher in pharmacoepidemiology and medication safety research using large healthcare databases with a focus on cardiovascular diseases and diabetes mellitus, cancer and neurological conditions. Prof Wei currently holds positions of honorary professor at University Dundee and executive editor of British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology. She is the UCL representative of the European Network of Centres for Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacovigilance (ENCePP) Partner and the chair of Expert Review Committee for Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD). She was awarded a prestigious fellowship from the MRC UK in health services and health of the public research in 2005. She has developed her career which has focused on delivering research that is practice-changing and internationally recognised. Her total research grant income to date is £6.7 million and her h-index is 60 with a total citation of >12000 (Google Scholar). Professor Wei has a track record of publications in large database research and RCT studies with over 280 publications including research published in Lancet and Lancet series, BMJ, Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA Internal Medicine, Journal of the American College of Cardiology, European Heart Journal and Brain.
The BMJ paper entitled “Association between cardiovascular events and sodium-containing effervescent, dispersible, and soluble drugs: nested case-control study” was published in 2013 (BMJ. 2013 Nov 26;347:f6954. doi: 10.1136/bmj.f6954) and received widespread publicity including being featured by the BBC. The research led to a European Medicines Agency (EMA) directive for all such medications to have the sodium content clearly labelled. The study was shortlisted for the UK Research Paper of the Year, 2014, The BMJ Awards and was selected for the REF 2021 impact case study at UCL.
Dr Ruth Brauer
UCL
Symposium Presenter
Biography
Dr Ruth Brauer is a health data scientist whose research focuses on evaluating the broader potential of routinely prescribed medicines to prevent health complications. She led and published one of the first observational studies examining whether GLP-1 receptor agonists may help prevent neurodegenerative diseases (2020), and published a widely disseminated study on whether PDE-5 inhibitors may reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease (2024). For research focused on women’s health, Dr Brauer received a Pharmalliance Early Career grant (2024) and Diabetes UK project grant (2026). In addition to grant funding, her women’s health research has resulted in peer-reviewed publications and presentations at national and international conferences. Dr Brauer has been a member of the Neurological and Mental Health Global Epidemiology Network (NeuroGEN) since its inception.
Dr Daniel Tsai
National Cheng Kung University
Symposium Presenter
Biography
Daniel Tsai is a postdoctoral research fellow at Population Health Data Center, NCKU. He specializes in comparative effectiveness research and policy research. His expertise includes triangulating claims databases, electronic health records, and biomedical databases to inform causal inference. Additionally, he is actively involved in the intersection of artificial intelligence and geriatric medicine. Moreover, Daniel serves as an educational co-lead of the Asian Pharmacoepidemiology Network (AsPEN) and is an active member of the Neurological and Mental Health Global Epidemiology Network (NeuroGEN), where he contributes to fostering international research collaboration and advancing pharmacoepidemiology.
Prof Olaf Klungel
Utrecht University
Symposium Presenter
Biography
