Cochrane Hypertension

James (Jim) Wright obtained his MD from the University of Alberta in 1968, his FRCP(C) in Internal Medicine in 1975 and his PhD in Pharmacology from McGill University in 1976. He is a practicing specialist in Internal Medicine and Clinical Pharmacology. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Therapeutics Letter. He sits on the Editorial Boards of PLoS One and the Cochrane Library.
Dr. Wright’s research focuses on issues related to appropriate use of prescription drugs (particularly antihypertensive and lipid lowering drugs), Clinical Pharmacology, clinical trials, systematic review, meta-analysis and knowledge translation.

Ken Bassett conducts systematic reviews of the efficacy and safety of new and established drugs, as well as pharmaco-epidemiologic studies of serious adverse events associated with prescription drug therapy in British Columbia. His ongoing research interests are in the systematic review of drug therapy and drug funding policy.

Colin Dormuth has extensive experience using administrative health care databases to evaluate pharmaceutical policy changes and physician prescribing behaviour. He has been a member of the Therapeutics Initiative since 1995. His research focuses on drug safety and effectiveness, as well as the design and evaluation of reimbursement policies for prescription drugs. He has training in economic theory, applied econometrics, epidemiology, health services outcome research and biostatistics. Dr. Dormuth holds a Sc.D. and S.M. in epidemiology from Harvard University, an M.A. in economics from the University of Victoria, and a B.A. in economics from the University of Manitoba.

Alan Cassels has decades of experience researching and writing on pharmaceuticals, particularly drug benefits policies, and the politics of pharmaceutical research, marketing, and coverage.  His main specialties are documenting the gap between marketing and science in the pharmaceutical and medical screening industries, and trying to improve the quality of medical reporting. His journalism aims to take high quality evidence-based medical information and make it simple and understandable for consumers.

Alan has written an international bestseller on the pharmaceutical industry’s role in the creation and marketing of illness, Selling Sickness, with Ray Moynihan (Greystone, 2005), an illustrated poetry book on disease mongering, The ABCs of Disease Mongering:  An Epidemic in 26 Letters (EmDash, 2007) and a book on medical screening (Seeking Sickness:  Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease (Greystone, 2012). His latest book is The Cochrane Collaboration: Medicine’s Best Kept Secret, (Agio, 2015).

Mohamed received his undergraduate pharmacy degree from the University of Benghazi, Libya in 2007 (Honours), completed his MSc in Pharmaceutical Sciences (Pharmacokinetics) from the University of Alberta in 2012, and his PhD in Experimental Medicine from the University of British Columbia in 2018. After his PhD, Mohamed joined the Therapeutics Initiative as a postdoctoral research fellow (Drug Assessment Working Group and Cochrane Hypertension Review Group), working under the join supervision of Prof. James Wright and Dr. Vijaya Musini. In addition, he maintains his patient care pharmacist license through front line work in community pharmacy. Dr. Ben-Eltriki’s current research focuses on clinical pharmacy, systematic review, evaluating drug safety and effectiveness, and critical appraisal of clinical practice guidelines.

Balraj (Benji) Heran received a B.Sc. (Hon.) in Physiology at the UBC and joined the TI in 2000. He recently graduated from the Ph.D. program in the Department of Anesthesiology, Pharmacology and Therapeutics, UBC. Under the supervision of Dr. Jim Wright, he conducted two systematic reviews of the dose-related blood pressure lowering efficacy of ACE inhibitors and angiotensin receptor blockers for primary hypertension. He is also a contributing author of a number of systematic reviews and protocols published in the Cochrane Library. From 2003 to 2009 he has served on the editorial team of the Cochrane Collaboration Hypertension Review Group as the Trial Search Co-ordinator, since 2009 has been an Editor with the Cochrane Hypertension Group and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Cochrane Heart Group. He has a keen interest in cardiovascular research.

Ciprian Jauca studied linguistics at the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania (major in Romance Languages, minor in Germanistic Studies) from 1986 to 1990. In 1991 he earned an International Diploma of Business Management and Intercultural Communication from the University of Osnabruck, Germany. He speaks several languages and has worked as translator and simultaneous interpreter, as well as managing social development projects for non-profit organizations. Ciprian joined the Therapeutics Initiative at its inception in 1994. He is the Managing Editor for the Therapeutics Letter and has been the Program Coordinator for the Therapeutics Initiative from its inception in 1994 until 2018. He created the Therapeutics Initiative website in the late 1990s and has been serving as its webmaster. He has been involved in the international Cochrane Collaboration since 2001, serving as the Managing Editor for Cochrane Hypertension. He has been involved in the International Society of Drug Bulletins since 2003, was elected as a member of the Executive Committee in 2008 and was elected Secretary General of the organization in 2016. Ciprian served as an elected member of the Board of Directors for the Association of Administrative and Professional Staff (AAPS) at the University of British Columbia from 2011 to 2015. Ciprian is currently serving as a member of the Board of Directors of the Laurier Institution, Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer of Colibri Learning Foundation and Vice-Chairman of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’í Community of Canada.

Dr Carole Lunny is a clinical epidemiologist and research methodologist with the Cochrane Hypertension Review Group, and the Therapeutics Initiative at the University of British Columbia. Dr Lunny specialises in methods for research synthesis and critical appraisal of systematic reviews, network meta-analyses, randomised controlled trials, overviews of reviews, and observational studies. She routinely tells people she is an expert in identifying bias and error in clinical research studies. Dr Lunny completed her PhD training at Cochrane Australia in January 2019 from Monash University’s School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine.

Dr Lunny’s current research is the development of a risk of bias tool for systematic reviews with network meta-analysis, tools for ‘overviews of reviews’, assessment of the impact of evidence syntheses on health systems and policy, and knowledge translation. She teaches courses at UBC and the University of Toronto.

To date, Dr Lunny has 24 publications, 16 of the 24 as first author, which have been cited 415 times as of July 2020. 16 out of the 24 studies are systematic reviews. You can access her publication at: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=lunny+c&sort=date

Dr Lunny has been conducting systematic reviews since 2008 when she was hired as a Knowledge Synthesis Consultant with the International Centre for Infectious Diseases. She is an expert in conducting various types of knowledge syntheses including systematic reviews with and without meta-analysis, scoping reviews, evidence maps, network meta-analyses, meta-epidemiology and methods studies. She is an editor for the journal PeerJ and Systematic Reviews, and has peer reviewed for seven journals.

Dr Lunny is a member of the Cochrane Collaborations Statistical methods group and five other Cochrane methods groups, the SPOR Evidence Alliance, BC SUPPORT Unit, the Joanna Briggs Institute, the Campbell Collaboration, and the Open Science Taskforce at UBC.

Dr Lunny has been awarded over $515,000 in lifetime grant dollars and $257,000 in scholarship and award funding. She received two PhD scholarships– the International Postgraduate Research Scholarship and the Australian Postgraduate Award – from both the Cochrane Collaboration at Monash University (accepted) and the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) at University of Adelaide (declined). Dr Lunny worked for seven years for international development organisations such as the UNDP, UNICEF, the International Collaboration Centre for Infectious Diseases, the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease in the US, Canada, Singapore, Myanmar, Thailand and Mexico.

Vijaya Musini has conducted and supervised over 200 systematic reviews and meta-analyses on prescription drug therapy. She is an Editor of the Cochrane Hypertension Review Group and has been actively involved in teaching Cochrane Collaboration systematic review methodology and critical appraisal skills on evidence based drug therapy to undergraduate, graduate, medical students and residents.

Dr. Musini graduated from Mumbai University Medical School in 1982. After completing her rotating internship she joined the Department of Community Medicine in 1984 and graduated with a Diploma in Public Health from Mumbai University Medical School in 1985.

She has worked as a Family Practitioner and as a Medical Officer in primary health care centres in Mumbai, India for several years. She also worked as a research assistant in the Departments of Gynaecology and Obstetrics, and Health Care and Epidemiology, Faculty of Medicine, Kuwait University. She immigrated to Canada in 1996 and graduated with a Masters Degree in Pharmacology and Therapeutics from the University of British Columbia in 2000.

Marco Perez obtained his MD degree at the University of Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1991. He completed his specialty in Intensive Care Medicine in 1996. He worked as practicing specialist in an intensive care unit for several years. He obtained his PhD in Pharmacology & Therapeutics at the University of British Columbia in 2010, specializing in hypertension and hypertensive emergencies. During his PhD, he conducted two Cochrane systematic reviews and a randomized controlled trial. He has also been a contributing author of a number of systematic reviews published in the Cochrane Library and other peer-reviewed medical journals. Since 2006 he has served on the editorial team of Cochrane Hypertension. He has also been actively involved with the Therapeutics Initiative in the drug assessment-working group, since 2003; and as a clinical reviewer with the Common Drug Review, since 2007. He has completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Institut de la Sante et Recherche Medicale (INSERM) in the Université de Lyon, France, working in an international (French/Canadian) hypertension research project.

Dr. Lorri Puil obtained her MD from the University of Toronto and has postgraduate training in internal medicine, hematology and clinical pharmacology. She holds a PhD from the University of Toronto in molecular biology (signal transduction), a field directly applicable to the development and assessment of novel therapeutics such as targeted molecules and biologics.

Dr. Puil has 15 years of experience in conducting systematic reviews and directing multidisciplinary knowledge synthesis teams in the evaluation of health care interventions. She is actively involved in teaching research synthesis methods, the critical appraisal of clinical trials and non-randomized studies, and evidence-based drug therapy to health professionals and students. Dr. Puil’s ongoing research interests are the benefits and harms of prescription drugs, including their molecular effects, and methods to improve the quality of evidence syntheses to support policy and clinical decision making.

Dr. Puil is a senior member of the Drug Assessment Working Group, a contributor to Therapeutic Letters, an Editor of the Cochrane Hypertension Group, and a member of the Cochrane & Campbell Equity Methods Group, which aims to improve the applicability of evidence to diverse populations.

Douglas M Salzwedel obtained a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Western Ontario in 2001 and has worked as the Information Specialist for the Therapeutics Initiative and Cochrane Hypertension since June 2009.  In addition to information retrieval projects, he leads Cochrane Hypertension’s priority setting activities, and is a member of the Drug Assessment Working Group and the Communications and Outreach Group.

During his time with the TI, Douglas served on the Cochrane Information Specialists’ Executive from 2011 to 2017 and from 2015 to 2018 he provided induction training, software training, mentoring and ongoing support to Cochrane Information Specialists across Cochrane’s international network as a member of Cochrane’s Information Specialists’ Support Team.  He is also a Co-Convenor of PRESSforum, a peer review portal for health sciences librarians engaged in systematic review searching.

Prior to joining the Therapeutics Initiative, Douglas was the information specialist for the Cochrane Effective Practice and Organisation of Care (EPOC) Review Group and a librarian at the University of Ottawa’s Institute of Population Health.

Muhammad-Ismail Shawish obtained his bachelor’s degree in Pharmacy (BPharm) from Damascus University, Syria in 2012. Shawish is currently a graduate student at the UBC Anesthesiology, Pharmacology, and Therapeutics Department. His research focuses on the effects of statins on androgens levels, and the effect of phosphodiesterase-5 inhibitors on blood pressure. In addition, he also focuses on evaluating drug safety of other drugs. He has been a member of the Therapeutics Initiative since 2017; since then he has extensively been working with members of the group on conducting Cochrane systematic reviews.

Gavin Wong obtained a Bachelor in Economics at the Ohio State University in 2002, a B.Sc in Allied Medical Professions (Respiratory Therapy) at the Ohio State University in 2006, a RRT in the National Board for Respiratory Care, USA in 2006 and a PhD in Pharmacology and Therapeutics from the University of British Columbia in 2016. He is an Associate Member of the Canadian Society of Respiratory Therapists and an author of Cochrane systematic reviews with the Cochrane Hypertension Group. He has conducted several systematic reviews and meta-analyses on prescription drug therapy.