ReLiSyR-Mental Health: Repurposing Living Systematic Reviews to inform drug selection for clinical trials in mental health

My PhD will develop a Repurposing Living Systematic Review which will curate and analyse evidence streams relevant to clinical trials in mental health. In addition to considering single drug interventions, ReLiSyR-Mental Health will consider combination drug interventions, non-pharmacological treatments, and combinations of treatment modalities. I will use triangulation approaches to integrate information preclinical data, clinical data and large-scale human genetics research. Further, I will develop Bayesian ranking approaches to prioritising interventions for subsequent research.

In the initial phase, I will develop Systematic Online Living Evidence Summaries (SOLES) for preclinical and clinical in vivo research related to psychosis, depression, and anxiety, intending to utilise these platforms in ReLiSyR-Mental Health's development.

Systematic Online Living Evidence Summaries (SOLES) are interactive platforms which seek to provide a comprehensive overview of the literature relevant to a given area of research. SOLES use supervised NLP screening algorithms to identify publications relevant to a given research area of interest. This methodology seeks to optimise specificity of the SOLES platform whilst maintaining efficiency of their development workflow.

A distinguishing feature of SOLES platforms is that they hold a corpus of studies that has already been through an initial automated screening process. By automating full-text retrieval and employing text-mining approaches, PICO elements not included within the Title and Abstract (TiAb) text of a research article can be extracted from the full-text, allowing for a more granular characterisation of the available literature than typically possible in biomedical libraries.

Constraints on time and researcher availability often impede comprehensive evidence synthesis, with dual-screening of papers for inclusion being particularly resource intensive. Further, the challenge of including all pertinent PICO (Patient, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome) elements within the word count limitations of Title and Abstract (TiAb) text in primary research articles means that standard literature searches often fail to capture all of the relevant research.

Conducting a literature search within the relevant SOLES platform, as opposed to a biomedical library, may reduce the retrieval of irrelevant citations whilst enhancing the search's sensitivity. This may optimise the efficiency and completeness of study selection for systematic reviews, and thus enhance the depth and quality of the evidence synthesis. A secondary PhD aim will be to validate the methodology of this study selection approach.