Charis Wong

Biography Charis is a PhD student, neurology registrar and clinical fellow in data-driven drug selection with the University of Edinburgh. She is interested in neurodegenerative diseases, in particular developing methodology to systematically identify, evaluate and report evidence to improve drug selection for clinical trials. My research in a nutshell Neurodegenerative diseases are disabling, progressive neurological diseases. Despite decades of research, there is a lack of effective treatments to slow, stop or reverse these diseases. I am studying ways we can use different types of data to improve how drugs are selected for clinical trials in neurodegenerative diseases, in particular motor neuron disease. These include data from published studies of various neurodegenerative diseases, data on how drugs affect different pathways, and emerging data from testing human stem cells. Charis developed the Systematic Living Evidence for Clinical Trials (SyLECT) framework (https://osf.io/7mza9) to achieve the above, and have successfully applied this to inform drug selection for MND-SMART (NCT04302870), a multi-arm, multi-stage, adaptive platform trial evaluating drugs in motor neuron disease/amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.