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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- September 2022 – Present McGill Department of Equity, Ethics and Policy
Montréal, Québec, Canada
Research Associate - January 2020 – July 2022 Berlin Institute of Health
Berlin, Germany
Postdoctoral fellow in the ethics of artificial intelligence and machine learning in human research; methods and data science support - 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
- September 2022 – Present McGill Department of Equity, Ethics and Policy
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
- Holst, M and Carlisle BG. Trials that turn from retrospectively registered to prospectively registered: a cohort study of “retroactively prospective” clinical trial registration using history data. Trials, 2024. doi: 10.1186/s13063-024-08029-5
- Hutchinson N, Bicer S, Feldhake E, Carlisle BG, Gönen M, Del Paggio J, Kimmelman J. Probability of Regulatory Approval Over Time: A Cohort Study of Cancer Therapies. JCO Oncology, 2023. doi: 10.1200/OP.23.00363
- Salholz-Hillel M, Pugh-Jones M, Hildebrand N, Schult TA,
Schwietering J, Grabitz P, Carlisle BG, Goldacre B,
Strech D and DeVito NJ. Dissemination of Registered COVID-19 Clinical Trials (DIRECCT): a cross-sectional study. BMC Medicine, 2023. doi: 10.1186/s12916-023-03161-6 - Holst M, Haslberger M, Yerunkar S, Strech D, Hemkens, LG and Carlisle BG. Frequency of multiple changes to prespecified
primary outcomes of clinical trials completed
between 2009 and 2017 in German university medical
centers: A meta-research study. PLOS Medicine, 2023. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1004306 - Franzen DL, Carlisle BG, Salholz-Hillel M, Riedel N and
Strech D. Institutional dashboards on clinical trial
transparency for University Medical Centers: A case
study. PLOS Medicine, 2023. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1004175 - Carlisle BG, Coffman DL, Egleston BL, Salholz-Hillel M. Training Artificial Intelligence on a Gender-Biased Virtual World can Result in Biased Conclusions. Ann Surg Oncol, 2023. doi: 10.1245/s10434-023-13557-6
- Franzen, D, Carlisle BG, Salholz-Hillel, M, Riedel N, Strech D. Institutional dashboards on clinical trial transparency for University Medical Centers: A case study. PLOS Medicine, 2023. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1004175
- Hutchison N, Klas K, Carlisle BG, Polak, M, Kimmelman J, Waligora M. Competition for recruitment in SARS-CoV-2 Trials in the United States: a longitudinal cohort analysis. BMC Research Notes, 2022. doi: 10.1186/s13104-022-06263-1
- Carlisle, BG. Analysis of clinical trial registry entry histories using the novel R package cthist. PLOS One, 2022. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0270909
- Maia Salholz-Hillel, Daniel Strech, Benjamin Gregory Carlisle. Results publications are inadequately linked to trial registrations: An automated pipeline and evaluation of German university medical centers. Clinical Trials, 2022. doi: 10.1177/17407745221087456
- Nora Hutchinson, Katarzyna Klas, Benjamin G. Carlisle, Jonathan Kimmelman, Marcin Waligora. How informative were early SARS-CoV-2 treatment and prevention trials? a longitudinal cohort analysis of trials registered on ClinicalTrials.gov. PLOS One, 2022. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0262114
- Hutchinson N, Carlisle BG, Dousseau A, Bosan R, Gumnit E, MacPherson A, Fergusson D, Kimmelman J. Patient Participation in Clinical Trials of Oncology Drugs and Biologics Preceding Approval by the US Food and Drug Administration. JAMA Network Open, 2021. doi:
- 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
- cthist
Historical clinical trial registry data can only be retrieved by manually accessing individual clinical trials through registry websites. This limits the feasibility, accuracy and reproducibility of certain kinds of research on clinical trial activity and presents challenges to the transparency of the enterprise of human research. This R package, cthist, is a novel, free and open source R package that enables mass downloading of clinical trial registry entry histories and returns structured data for analysis.
- 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 Systematic Review 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 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 AGPL 3.