Sean Hennessy, PharmD, PhD

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Professor of Epidemiology in Biostatistics and Epidemiology
Department: Biostatistics and Epidemiology

Contact information
University of Pennsylvania
423 Guardian Drive
803 Blockley Hall
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6021
Office: 215-898-9112
Fax: 215-573-5315
Education:
BS (Pharmacy)
Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science, 1989.
PharmD (Clinical Pharmacy)
Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science, 1990.
MSCE (Clinical Epidemiology)
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, 1996.
PhD (Epidemiology with Biostatistics minor)
University of Pennsylvania, 2002.
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Description of Research Expertise

Sean Hennessy leads Penn's Division of Epidemiology and its Center for Real-world Effectiveness and Safety of Therapeutics (CREST). His research evaluates the real-world effectiveness and safety of prescription drugs using healthcare data. His research program studies serious health consequences of drug-drug interactions involving high-risk drugs including anticoagulants, treatments for diabetes, and medications used for opioid use disorder, and is widely cited in clinical compendia of drug-drug interactions. He and his colleagues identified a survival benefit of potassium supplements in users of loop diuretics, and found that this survival benefit increases with hotter outdoor temperatures. They also found that the survival benefit of statin drugs increases with hotter outdoor temperatures. His team also evaluated an early approach, known as drug utilization review, to using health insurance data to improve prescribing, finding it ineffective despite its federal mandate. This contributed to the omission of a requirement for drug utilization review programs in Medicare Part D. He co-led a pair of studies that demonstrated the effectiveness and safety of the SA14-14-2 vaccine for Japanese encephalitis (JE), which subsequently led to the immunization of millions of children per year in populous countries including Cambodia, India, Malaysia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. Use of that vaccine has been credited with reducing the worldwide incidence of JE. He and his colleagues also developed the instrumented difference-in-differences research design for studying the effects of exposures with marked time trends. He was the senior author of one of two citizen petitions to the US Food and Drug Administration that led to re-labeling of metformin, the best-proven therapy for type 2 diabetes, to permit its use in the millions of persons with both diabetes and mild-to-moderate renal insufficiency. He has served as chair of NIH's Health Services and Organizational Delivery study section and its Health Services Quality and Effectiveness study section.

Selected Publications

Chen C, Hennessy S, Brensinger CM, Miano TA, Bilker WB, Dublin S, Chung SP, Horn JR, Tiwari A, Leonard CE: Comparative risk of injury with concurrent use of opioids and skeletal muscle relaxants. Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics 2024 (https://doi.org/10.1002/cpt.3248).

Brumberg K, Ellis DE, Small DS, Hennessy S, Rosenbaum PR: Using natural strata when examining unmeasured biases in an observational study of neurological side effects of antibiotics. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C 2023 (https://doi.org/10.1093/jrsssc/qlad010).

Shah M, Mamtani R, Marmarelis ME, Hennessy S: Chemoimmunotherapy versus immunotherapy for first line treatment of advanced non-small cell lung 2 cancer with a PD-L1 expression >=50% or >=90%. Clinical Lung Cancer 2023 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cllc.2023.02.007).

Roy S, Ye T, Ertefaie A, Vo T-T, Flory J, Hennessy S, Small D: Group sequential testing under instrumented difference-in-differences approach. Statistics in Medicine 2023 (https://doi.org/10.1002/sim.9836).

Shu D, Han P, Hennessy S, Miano TA: Robust causal inference of drug-drug interactions. Statistics in Medicine 2023 (https://doi.org/10.1002/sim.9653).

Micale C, Golder S, O'Connor K, Weissenbacher D, Gross R, Hennessy S, Gonzalez-Hernandez G: Patient‑reported reasons for antihypertensive medication change: A quantitative study using social media. Drug Safety 2023 (doi: 10.1007/s40264-023-01366-5).

Pham Nguyen TP, Gray SL, Newcomb CW, Liu Q, Hamedani AG, Weintraub D, Hennessy S, Willis AW.: Potentially inappropriate medications in older adults with Parkinson disease before and after hospitalization for injury. Parkinsonism & Related Disorders 2023 (doi.org/10.1016/j.parkreldis.2023.105793).

Abraham AS, Nguyen TPP, Newcomb CW, Gray SL, Hennessy S, Leonard CE, Liu Q, Weintraub D, Willis AW: Comparative safety of antimuscarinics versus mirabegron for overactive bladder in Parkinson disease. Parkinsonism and Related Disorders 2023 (DOI: 10.1016/j.parkreldis.2023.105822).

Dhopeshwarkar N, Yang W, Hennessy S, Rhodes JM, Cuker A, Leonard CE: Combining SuperLearner with high-dimensional propensity score to improve confounding adjustment: A real-world application in chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety 2023 (DOI: 10.1002/pds.5678 ).

Golder S, Medaglio D, O'Connor K, Hennessy S, Gross R, Gonzalez Hernandez G: Reasons for discontinuation or change of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors in online drug reviews. JAMA Network Open 6: e2323746, 2023.

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Last updated: 03/14/2024
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