ACPE14 will be held as a hybrid meeting with participants attending in-person and remote participants attending via a virtual conference platform.

Main conference: Saturday 22 and Sunday 23 October

Download the conference program
View the interactive program

View the oral abstracts 

ACPE14 ePoster listing 

View the ePoster abstracts 

Keynote speaker

Dr Soko Setoguchi
Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School

Dr Soko Setoguchi, MD, DrPH is a practicing general internist and epidemiologist, is Professor of Medicine, Director of Clinical Research Education, Department of Medicine, Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and Professor of Epidemiology at Rutgers School of Public Health. She is recognized as an international leader in the field of pharmacoepidemiology and comparative effectiveness research (CER) studying the health effects of medications, medical devices, and other medical products in populations. She has a track record of NIH/PCORI/Foundation/Industry funding with research focus on pharmacoepidemiology, health service/outcome research, and CER using large databases and linkage of various databases/records as well as applied epidemiology method research.

Most recently, she has been focusing her efforts on pharmacoepidemiologic and health services/outcome research to understand and address health issues and interplay between medications and climate change, the single biggest health threat facing humanity by WHO.

Studying and practicing medicine and pharmacoepidemiology in both Japan and the USA, Dr Setoguchi is passionate about globalizing and ‘futurizing’ pharmacoepidemiology and health service/outcome research by actively teaching in and outside of the USA, training global scholars of diverse background, and collaborating with non-US institutions on NIH funded studies.

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Pharmacoepidemiology for the future in Asia-Pacific and around the globe  

Soko Setoguchi, MD, DrPH, Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at Rutgers University and Chair of the ACPE International Steering Committee, will review the state of the art in pharmacoepidemiology including the advancement of RWE methods, use of RWE for regulatory decisions, and multi-database studies/collaborations and their implications in Asia. She will then discuss ‘pharmacoepidemiology for the future in Asia-Pacific and around the globe’. Dr. Setoguchi will share her global perspective as a pharmacoepidemiologist, applied methodologist, clinician and global citizen, focusing on the role of pharmacoepidemiology in advancing data science, addressing the climate crisis, and educating the public and future pharmacoepidemiologists.

Hot topic speaker

Dr Yingfen Hsia
Queen's University Belfast

Dr Yingfen Hsia has joint appointment at School of Pharmacy in Queen’s University Belfast and St George’s University of London (SGUL). Prior to her current position, she worked at the Centre for Paediatric Pharmacy Research, University College London School of Pharmacy for several years. Dr Hsia has a good track record in research pertaining to medication use in vulnerable populations, notably children. She uses a wide range of epidemiological methods and statistical techniques in her research projects. In the past few years, her research works mainly focuses on global paediatric antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and vaccine-preventable childhood diseases. In addition to AMR works, she continues her research on other paediatric medications. She is currently leading a WHO paediatric formulation project at SGUL. The results from this project will be feedback to WHO Essential Medicine List (EML) group to identify the gaps of paediatric formulations at global level.
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Clinical application of applying machine leaning to determine empirical antibiotics treatment in bloodstream infections

The key to prescribing appropriate antibiotics in clinical practice relies on culture-based antibiogram results. However, it is usually time consuming and costly. Many resource-limited settings may not have laboratory facilities. Applying machine learning algorithms to datasets could assist the development of a clinical decision tool to improve empiric prescribing with widespread utility. This could have a profound effect on antibiotic prescribing and would be especially valuable to healthcare workers especially in low- and middle-income countries who do not have access to the facilities required for rapid antimicrobial sensitivity testing, thus improving the chances of correct and effective treatment worldwide.

Hot topic speaker

Prof Sun-Yuan Hsieh
National Cheng Kung University

Sun-Yuan Hsieh received the PhD degree in computer science from National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, in June 1998, and now he is a chair professor. Dr. Hsieh has an extremely impressive record of research achievements in areas of artificial intelligent and applications, deep learning algorithms, graph algorithms, and fault-tolerant computing. His awards include the 2020 ACM Distinguished scientist, and outstanding research awards in National Science and Technology Council. He is Fellow of the IEEE, Fellow of the British Computer Society (BCS), Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), and Fellow of Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association.
Dr. Hsieh is an experienced editor with editorial services to a number of journals, including IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Reliability, IEEE ACCESS, Journal of Computer and System Science (Elsevier), Theoretical Computer Science (Elsevier), Discrete Applied Mathematics (Elsevier), Journal of Supercomputing (Springer), Editor-in-Chiefs of International Journal of Computer Mathematics (Taylor & Francis Group), Parallel Processing Letters (World Scientific), Discrete Mathematics, Algorithms and Applications (World Scientific), and Managing editor of Journal of Interconnection Networks (World Scientific).
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Predicting colorectal cancer survival from whole slide images using deep Learning

Many methodologies for selecting histopathological images, such as sample image patches or segment histology from regions of interest (ROI) or whole-slide images (WSIs), have been utilized to develop survival models. It remains challenging to obtain clinically prognostic and explainable features from gigapixel WSIs with diverse histological appearances. Therefore, we propose a survival prediction approach based on histopathological and image segmentation features extracted from WSIs. The cancer genome atlas colon adenocarcinoma (TCGA-COAD) dataset was used in this investigation. DeepConvSurv extracts histopathological information from the image patches of nine different tissue types, including tumors, lymphocytes, stroma, and mucus. The tissue map of the WSIs was segmented using image processing techniques that involved localizing and quantifying the tissue region. We extracted 128 histopathological features from four histological types and five image segmentation features from WSIs to predict colorectal cancer survival. Our method performed better in six distinct survival models than the WSISA adaptively sampled patches using K-means from WSIs. Using a combination of deep-learning-based histopathological characteristics and image segmentation, we demonstrated a clinically relevant survival prediction model.

AsPEN symposium: Rising Investigator Asian-Pacific Regions

The AsPEN symposium will highlight the missions, achievements and strategies of the AsPEN and will also showcase presentations from three groups of young researchers who have collaborated on cross-country projects in Pharmacoepidemiology. These young researchers are competing for a new award, the AsPEN Rising Investigator, Asian-Pacific Regions which will be judged during the symposium.

Objectives:

  1. To cultivate more pharmacoepidemiologists from Asian-Pacific regions by providing opportunities for young researchers to work together and discuss a potential cross-countries project.
  2. To provide opportunities for young researchers to learn from mentors’ experiences for preparing a cross-countries projects.
  3. To provide a stage for young researchers to present their proposals, and to acquire the feedbacks from all mentors and audiences.
  4. To select the best presentation (Rising Investigator) and provide the winner team resources to complete the project.

Agenda:

Introduction of AsPEN: the missions, achievements and strategies of AsPEN
Nam-Kyong Choi, Ehwa Women’s University Korea, Korea

Group presentations
Group 1: Han Eol Jeong, Eunsun Lim, Steven Shen, Jun Ni Ho, Zixuan Wang
Mentors: ‪Nam-Kyong Choi and Nicole Pratt

Group 2: Juliana de Oliveira Costa, Na-Young Jeong, Sungho Bea, Miyuki Hsieh, Jack Janetzki, Adrienne Chan
Mentors: Kenneth Man and Ju-Young Shin

Group 3: Hee-Jin Kim, Dongwon Yoon, Daniel Tsai, Claudia Bruno, Shiori Nishimura, Le Gao
Mentors: Wallis Lau and Edward Lai

Announcement of winner team and rising investigators & Future directions for the AsPEN
Kenneth KC Man, University College London, UK and The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Closing keynote session:

Real-World Evidence Driven Decision Making in Asian Pacific Regions: Current and Future Perspective.

Prof Sallie Pearson
ISPE representative

Sallie is the Professor of Health Systems at the School of Population Health and the Theme Principal for Health Systems Research, Faculty of Medicine and Health, UNSW Sydney. She is also the Director of the NHMRC Medicines Intelligence Centre of Research Excellence (MI-CRE), a collaborative research program with investigators based across nine Australian universities and scientific advisors from six leading international academic institutions. MI-CRE’s primary purpose is to develop a coordinated approach to accelerate real-world evidence development for medicines policy decision makers. Sallie is a leading authority in the conduct of population-based research using routinely collected data and has led national and international studies leveraging ‘big health data’ to generate real-world evidence on the use, cost (effectiveness) and safety of prescribed medicines.
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Assoc Prof Bor-Sheng Ko
ISPOR representative

Dr. Bor-Sheng Ko is now an associate professor and the director of the Department of Hematological Oncology, National Taiwan University Cancer Center. He is also an attending physician in in the Division of Hematology, Department of Internal Medicine, National Taiwan University Hospital, and the director of Tai-Cheng Cell Therapy Center, National Taiwan University. He received his medical degree from the National Taiwan University College of Medicine in 1995, after which he completed clinical training for internal medicine and Hematology/Hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) fellowship in National Taiwan University Hospital. He then received PhD degree from the Institute of Clinical Medicine in the National Taiwan University College of Medicine in 2011.
From 2006 to 2007, he was a visiting research scholar in the Department of Hematology, The University of Texas Health Science Center, Houston, Texas, USA and in the Department of Stem Cell Transplantation and Cellular Therapy, MD Anderson Cancer Center of University of Texas for one year. He was also a joint investigator in National Health Research Institute in Taiwan from 2010 to 2014. From 2013 to 2019, he was assigned as the Secretary-General of Taiwan Society of Blood and marrow Transplantation (TBMT), and was elected as the President of TBMT form 2019 to 2022. He is the president of Taiwan Society of Pharmacoeconomics and Outcome Research (TaSPOR/ISPOR Taiwan Chapter) since 2018, and still the execute director of TBMT.
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Asst Prof Krishna Undela
ISoP representative

Krishna Undela associated with ISPE since 2012. He served as a local organizing committee member of 7th ACPE held at Bengaluru, India in 2012. Later he attended 8th ACPE, 30th ICPE and 9th ACPE held at Hong Kong (2013), Taiwan (2014) and Thailand (2014) as a delegate. Krishna has served as the lead instructor for ‘Introduction to Non-Database Pharmacoepidemiology’ course for the 10th, 11th, 12th & 13th ACPE held in Australia (2017), China (2018), Japan (2019) and Korea (2021), where he led development and implementation of this important course targeting pharmacoepidemiology trainees from countries that don't have large databases. Currently, Krishna is a member of ISPE ACPE International Steering Committee.
Krishna completed his M.Pharm (Pharmacy Practice) from the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research (NIPER) Mohali, and his Ph.D. from the JSS Academy of Higher Education & Research, Mysuru. He worked as a Lecturer in the Department of Pharmacy Practice at JSS College of Pharmacy, Mysuru for 8 years. Thereafter he started working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacy Practice at NIPER Guwahati. He has taught Pharmacoepidemiology, Pharmacoeconomics, Pharmacovigilance, and Evidence Based Medicine. His areas of research are medication safety in special populations, medication therapy management in cardiology, and evidence synthesis.
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