Leading Epidemiologist Wendy Cheng Joins BRG’s Healthcare Practice as Managing Director

Dr. Cheng will extend epidemiologic methods to health analytics and outcomes research, strengthening scope of firm’s practice

BRG announced today that epidemiology expert Wendy Cheng has joined the firm’s Boston office as a managing director in its Healthcare practice.

Dr. Cheng will support pharmaceutical clients in health economics and outcomes research (HEOR) and epidemiology to develop strategies for product differentiation and access; and to implement analytic methods to generate real-world evidence to demonstrate unmet needs, comparative effectiveness and long-term safety of therapeutic products. Dr. Cheng also provides expert support and testimony in disputes that require the analysis of clinical data.

Most recently, Dr. Cheng was a vice president at a leading healthcare consulting firm, where she spent more than a decade advising pharmaceutical companies on data analytics for product development, regulatory approval and market adoption. Her experience includes natural history studies, economic and predictive modeling, real-world evidence development, surveys, individualized medicine, patient decision aids and post-approval and post-authorization safety studies for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and European Medicines Agency (EMA). Her work spans multiple therapeutic areas, including rare and ultra-rare diseases. She also specializes in applying advanced methodologies to address complex healthcare research challenges, including the use of machine-learning techniques to identify cost clusters and predict prognosis patterns and disease states in patient populations.

“Wendy’s knowledge of advanced epidemiologic research methods and tools such as machine learning is at the leading edge in the field,” said Edward Buthusiem, a managing director in BRG’s Health Analytics practice. “With her impressive academic background and over a decade of experience working with the pharmaceutical industry, she excels at sourcing viable, high-grade data to assess the safety of medications. Her work is pivotal to core pharmaceutical research processes—from the development of a drug to clinical trials to its widespread release—and our clients will greatly benefit from her talents.”

Dr. Cheng has collected and utilized data from clinical trials, administrative insurance claims, electronic medical records, site- and panel-based medical chart reviews, patient registries, large patient and physician surveys and longitudinal observational studies. She has conducted studies in more than 10 countries and published her research in numerous medical journals.

Before her foray into healthcare consulting, Dr. Cheng served as a research scientist at Columbia University and as a biostatistician in the Clinical Trials Network of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. She earned her PhD and MPH in epidemiology from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

Dr. Cheng commented, “I am excited to be a part of BRG’s Healthcare practice and to join a team of leading experts and renowned researchers in the field. I look forward to leveraging our deep understanding of HEOR and epidemiology and advanced analytics to support our clients’ products across their lifecycles.”