Clinical Fellow 2025 - 27

The 2025-2027 Norman Beischer Clinical Research Fellowship has been awarded to Dr Anthea Lindquist to ensure that pregnant women have access to much more robust evidence around medication use in pregnancy. The Fellowship will provide $600,000 funding towards supporting Anthea and her team of epidemiologists to generate the evidence, using Australia-wide linked data. Anthea plans to work with software engineers and consumers to build an online platform to showcase the evidence they generate and ensure that patients and clinicians alike can decide which medication is safest to use in pregnancy.

At present, there is a great unmet need for robust safety evidence for medicines already in use in pregnancy. Pregnant and breastfeeding women are deliberately excluded from clinical trials of new medicines ‘just to be safe’, meaning that new knowledge about safety is not being created. And of all industry sponsored clinical trials, only 1% are for pregnancy disorders. As a result, pregnant women often need to decide whether to take medicines based on evidence from small retrospective studies of average quality. Furthermore, nearly all studies have focused only on the risk of fetal malformations. Evidence on safety beyond birth hardly exists for any medication taken during pregnancy.

There is clearly an urgent need to generate high-quality and validated evidence on safety for common medicines used in pregnancy, including long-term outcomes for the children. Amassing evidence on drug safety from randomised trials is not feasible however due to ethical constraints and the costs and logistics of collecting long-term outcomes years after the primary trial has ended. Anthea and her team have already demonstrated the feasibility of an alternative approach – using population-wide data and sophisticated statistical techniques to ‘mimic’ the conditions of a randomised trial and examine the impact of exposures during pregnancy. They are the first team worldwide to publish using this approach in perinatal research.

A dual-trained obstetrician and epidemiologist, Dr Lindquist is Head of the Plenty Obstetric Unit at the Mercy Hospital for Women and Senior Research Fellow and co-lead of the Perinatal Epidemiology Group in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at The University of Melbourne. She is the Scientific Chair of the RANZCOG ASM for 2025, the peak scientific meeting for obstetricians and gynaecologists in Australia and New Zealand.

“I am deeply passionate about research in pregnancy, we still have so much to learn and understand. But pregnancy can be a challenging time to do clinical trial-based research, and not every question can be answered through a trial. Our team believes we have found a really novel solution – using Big Data and robust analyses to examine the impact of events and exposures during pregnancy on the mum and baby, potentially years into the future. It’s potential is very exciting’.

“This Fellowship provides an exceptional opportunity to support the team needed to get a project like this off the ground, and really critically, it will help us assemble the resources we need to translate our findings into an accessible online platform. We hope this will be a world-first’.