Benjamin Gregory Carlisle
Areas of specialization
- Cancer research ethics
- Drug development ethics
Areas of competence
- Human research ethics
- Research ethics
- Biomedical ethics
- Empirical bioethics research methods
Education
- 2014–2019 McGill University
Doctor of Philosophy, Experimental Medicine (Research ethics)
The moral efficiency of clinical trials in anti-cancer drug development
- 2009–2011 McGill University
Master of Arts, Philosophy (Bioethics)
A critique of phase IV seeding studies on the basis of a non-paternalistic justification for subject protections in human research
- 2003–2009 The University of Western Ontario
Bachelor of Arts, Honours Specialisation in Philosophy, Minor in Medical Science
Employment
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- January 2020 – December 2020 Berlin Institute of Health
Berlin, Germany
Postdoctoral fellow in the ethics of artificial intelligence and machine learning in human research - September 2010 – December 2019 McGill Biomedical Ethics Unit
Montréal, Québec, Canada
Research assistant in clinical cancer translational research ethics
- September 2009 – April 2010 McGill University Biomedical Ethics Unit
Montréal, Québec, Canada
Website manager
- January 2020 – December 2020 Berlin Institute of Health
Teaching
- January 2011 – April 2011 McGill University Department of Philosophy
Teacher’s assistant, Philosophy 237 (Contemporary Moral Issues) - September 2010 – December 2010 McGill University Department of Philosophy
Teacher’s assistant, Philosophy 230 (Intro to Moral Theory) - September 2009 – December 2009 McGill University Department of Philosophy
Teacher’s assistant, Philosophy 343 (Biomedical Ethics)
Service and communication
- July 2020 – August 2020
Co-organizer and presenter, #SummerSchool. A free, interdisciplinary academic conference. - April 2017 – Present
Community manager and site administrator, Scholar Social. A queer-friendly federated microblogging platform for academics.
https://scholar.social/ - July 2009 – Present
Blogger, The Grey Literature. Personal blog about: life in grad school, medical ethics, research ethics, statistical methods, and research programming in Python and R.
https://blog.bgcarlisle.com/
Publications
- Carlisle, BG. Non-existent ClinicalTrials.gov identifiers in abstracts indexed by PubMed. medRxiv, 2020. doi:
- Carlisle BG, Doussau A, Kimmelman J. Patient burden and clinical advances associated with postapproval monotherapy cancer drug trias: a retrospective cohort study. BMJ Open, 2020. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2019-034306
- Sarvas H, Carlisle BG, Dolter S, Vinarov E, Kimmelman J. Impact of Precision Medicine on Efficiencies of Novel Drug Development in Cancer. The Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 2019. doi: 10.1093/jnci/djz212
- Carlisle BG, Zheng T, Kimmelman J. Imatinib and the long tail of targeted drug development. Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology. Published 2019 October 24. doi: 10.1038/s41571-019-0287-0
- Carlisle BG, Doussau A, Kimmelman J. Benefit, burden, and impact for a cohort of post-approval cancer combination trials. Clinical Trials. Published 2019 Oct 3. doi: 10.1177/1740774519873883
- Carlisle BG, Mattina J, Zheng T, Kimmelman J. Patient Benefit and Risk in Anticancer Drug Development: A Systematic Review of the Ixabepilone Trial Portfolio. medRxiv. Published 2019 Aug 1. doi:
- Pratte M, Ganeshamoorthy S, Carlisle BG, Kimmelman J. How Well Are Phase 2 Cancer Trial Publications Supported by Preclinical Efficacy Evidence? International Journal of Cancer. Published 2019 May 14. doi: 10.1002/ijc.32405
- Carlisle BG, Federico C, Kimmelman J. Trials that say “maybe”: the disconnect between exploratory and confirmatory testing after drug approval. BMJ. Published 20 March 2018. doi: 10.1136/bmj.k959
- Kimmelman J, Carlisle B, Gönen M. Drug Development at the Portfolio Level Is Important for Policy, Care Decisions and Human Protections. JAMA. Published online August 24, 2017. doi:10.1001/jama.2017.11502
- Mattina J, Carlisle B, Hachem Y, Fergusson D, Kimmelman J. Inefficiencies and Patient Burdens in the Development of the Targeted Cancer Drug Sorafenib: A Systematic Review. PLOS Biology, 15(2) 2017.
- Carlisle B, Demko N, Freeman G, Hakala A, MacKinnon N, Ramsay T, Hey S, London AJ and Kimmelman J. Benefit, Risk, and Outcomes in Drug Development: A Systematic Review of Sunitinib. The Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 108(1) 2015.
- Hakala A, Kimmelman J, Carlisle B, Freeman G, Fergusson D. Accessibility of Trial Reports for Drugs Stalling in Development. British Medical Journal, 2015.
- Carlisle BG, Kimmelman J, Ramsay T, MacKinnon N. Unsuccessful Trial Accrual and Human Subjects Protections: An Empirical Analysis of Recently Closed Trials. Clinical Trials, 2014.
- Federico CA, Carlisle B, Kimmelman J, Fergusson DA. Late, Never, or Nonexistent: The Inaccessibility of Preclinical Evidence for New Drugs. British Journal of Pharmacology; DOI: 10.1111/bph.12771, 2014.
- London, A. J., Kimmelman, J., Carlisle, B. Rethinking Research Ethics: The Case of Postmarketing Trials. Science, 336(6081), 544–545, 2012.
Presentations
- Carlisle, B. G. Clinical agnosticism and when trials say “maybe.” Summer School hosted by Scholar Social, 2020 August 4.
- Carlisle, B. G. and Kimmelman J. The Clinical Return on Patient Burden for Label-Extending Cancer Drug Development. Canadian Student Health Research Forum, University of Manitoba. Winnipeg, MB. 2018 June 12.
- Carlisle, B. G. and Kimmelman J. Burden and Impact of Combination Therapy Exploration for New Anticancer Drugs. Society for Clinical Trials 39th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR. 2018 May 21.
- Carlisle, B. G., Mattina J., Zheng T., Kimmelman J. Patient Benefit and Risk in Anticancer Drug Development: A Systematic Review of the Ixabepilone Trial Portfolio The 16th Annual McGill Biomedical Graduate Conference, Montreal, QC. 2016 March 17.
- Carlisle, B. G. Trial Accrual and Ethics: An Empirical Analysis. Society for Clinical Trials 35th Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA. 2014 May 19 (Invited).
Awards and fellowships
- 2018 CIHR Travel Award (Canadian Student Health Research Forum)
- 2015-2017 Rabinowitch Fellowship
- 2009 UWO Dean’s honor list
- 2003 Rotary Community Involvement scholarship
Software
- Drug Trials Visualiser
The Drug Trials Visualiser is a tool for finding and displaying information about the development of drugs. It was originally designed in 2011 for internal use by the STREAM research group. It downloads trial data from www.clinicaltrials.gov and displays a chronological chart of all the clinical trials in the NLM database for the drug in question. FDA approvals, labeling revisions and other regulatory actions are also downloaded, parsed and overlaid on the graph. - Numbat Academic Meta-Analysis Extraction Manager
Numbat is free software first developed by PhD student Benjamin Carlisle in 2014 to facilitate meta-analytic work for the Animals, Humans and the Continuity of Evidence grant as well as the Signals, Safety and Success grant. It was re-written for use with Beaker Browser in 2017. It is designed for use in meta-analytic projects in an academic context—managing the extraction of large volumes of data from primary sources among multiple users, and then reconciling the differences between them. It is released as free and open-source under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. - Accumulating Evidence and Research Organization Chart Generator
The AERO generator is a free web-based application for generating AERO diagrams from spreadsheet data using the tikz package for LaTeX. The AERO (Accumulating Evidence and Research Organization) diagram is based on Spencer Hey’s paper (Hey et al., Trials 2013, 14:159 doi:10.1186/1745-6215-14-159) and the application was first developed in May 2014 by Benjamin Carlisle and Andrew Chung, members of the STREAM research group in the Biomedical Ethics Unit at McGill University. It is released as free and open-source under the GNU GPL v 2.