Alain Amstutz is an MD PhD focusing on innovative randomized trial designs, cluster randomized trials, trial evidence synthesis methods, and target trial emulations. He is passionate about advancing clinical research with applied clinical projects across Europe and Southern Africa, especially Lesotho.
He is currently a postdoc and project leader at the Division of Clinical Epidemiology (Basel, Switzerland), as well as a visiting postdoc at the Oslo Centre for Biostatistics and Epidemiology (OCBE, Oslo University Hospital) and the Bristol Medical School (University of Bristol, UK). He has conducted several cluster- and individual-randomized trials in Lesotho assessing HIV self-testing, treatment for HIV low-level viremia, adolescent care and service delivery for people living with other chronic diseases - as part of a large North-South research consortium.
He is part of the methods/stats team of EU-RESPONSE (pan-European platform trial for COVID-19 therapeutics) and MPX-RESPONSE (pan-European platform trial for Mpox therapeutics including an Mpox cohort study), project leader for the COVERALL trial (Swiss COVID-19 vaccine trial platform of SHCS and STCS), part of the Young Researchers' Group of the SHCS (Swiss HIV Cohort Study), and the global TwiCs network. As co-Principal Investigator of ComBaCaL, he currently builds a large-scale general population-based cohort study in two districts in Lesotho to investigate chronic diseases and how to decentralise services with the help of lay health workers and e-Health applications. Moreover, he investigates if and how sexual and reproductive health services can be offered at hair salons in Lesotho, is interested in individual patient data meta-analyses, currently conducting one on JAK inhibitors against COVID-19, and Patient and Public Involvement. Up to today, he has acquired substantial research funding as (Co-)Principal Investigator (>7 Million USD) and published >25 first- and last-author publications in peer-reviewed journals (Lancet Resp Med, Lancet HIV, PLOS Med, CID, JIAS, PLOS GPH, among others) and serves as Associate Editor at BMC Trials. He fluently speaks German, English, French and Italian and is constantly working on his Sesotho.