Estimating treatment effects for individual patients using randomized controlled trials: Promise and challenges

JOINT CORE/EBOH EPI Seminar Series Fall 2025

The Seminars in Epidemiology organized by the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health at the McGill School of Population and Global Health is a self-approved Group Learning Activity (Section 1) as defined by the maintenance of certification program of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. Physicians requiring accreditation, please complete the Evaluation Formand send to admincoord.eboh [at] mcgill.ca ()
 

Patrick R. Lawler, MD, MPH, FRCPC

Clinician-Scientist and Associate Professor|
McGill University and University of Toronto

WHEN: Monday, October 27, 2025, from 3:30-4:30pm
WHERE: Hybrid | 2001 McGill College, Rm 1140 &
Onsite at 5252 boul. de Maisonneuve - 3rd floor, 3B Kitchen | Zoom
**Note: Patrick Lawler will be presenting in-person at CORE
 

Speaker Bio

Dr. Patrick Lawler is director of the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit at the McGill University Health Centre in Montreal, and also a staff cardiologist at Toronto General Hospital in Toronto, both in Canada. He is an Associate Professor of Medicine at McGill University and the University of Toronto. His research employs Bayesian adaptive platform randomized clinical trials, clinical epidemiology, and translational methods. He has a focus on methods to identify heterogeneity of treatment effect in clinical trials. He has led randomized clinical trials in acutely/critically ill patients, and has also supported the design and implementation of others. His research has been funded by greater than $35M from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, philanthropy, and others, and has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, the European Heart Journal, Circulation, Intensive Care Medicine, Critical Care Medicine, and elsewhere. He is the chief medical officer at Sparked Inc., an early-stage Toronto-based microfluidic diagnostic company. He serves on executive committees for the American Heart Association and as the inaugural associate editor for cardiac critical care for the American College of Cardiology's open access journal JACC: Advances.

Learning Objectives

At the completion of this talk, attendees will be able to:

• Understand heterogeneous treatment effects in randomized controlled trials and their clinical implications;
• Develop familiarity with modern statistical methods to identify differential treatment responses across patient subgroups in clinical trials including the estimation of individualized treatment effects;
• Consider emerging clinical trial designs built around these frameworks.