Andrea Manca
Professor

Profile

Biography

Andrea is an applied health economist operating at the interface between academia and health policy.  He has extensive experience working with various stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem, including health technology assessment (HTA) agencies, clinicians, patient organisations, and the industry.  Andrea served for ten years (2012-2022) as a member of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) Technology Appraisal Committee and was Deputy Chair of the UK National Institute of Health Research Academy (NIHR) - Doctoral Research Fellowships panel from 2012 to 2024.  During the period 2021-2024, Andrea served as non-executive Director of the Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research ISPOR (2021-2024), a community with over 19,000 members from more than 110 countries.  His past roles also include membership of the ISPOR Bernie O'Brien New Investigator Award panel (2014-2017) and the Cancer Research UK National Awareness and Early Diagnosis Research Workstream (2010), now Early Diagnosis Initiative.   

Andrea is a Professor of Health Economics and has been at the University of York since 1999, a time during which he held visiting appointments with the Institute of Clinical Evaluative Sciences (Canada) and the Luxembourg Institute of Health.

Qualifications

•        BSc (Economics and Business), University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’, 1995.
•        MSc (Health Economics), Department of Economics and Related Studies, University of York, 1998
•        PhD (Economics), Department of Economics and Related Studies, University of York, 2005

Departmental roles

•        Management Team, Member (2020 - date) 
•        Research Committee, Chair (2023 – date) and Deputy Chair (2021 - 2023)
•        Data Access Request Group, Member (2023 - date)
•        Line Managers Group, Members (2015 - date)

University roles

•        University Research Committee, Member (2021-2024)
•        University Research Forum, Member (2021 -date)
•        Social Sciences Faculty Research Group, Member (2021 - date)
•        Research Information & Reporting group, Member (2023 - date)
•        Mentoring for academic and research staff, Mentor (2018 - date)

Research

Overview

Andrea is recognised for his methodological contributions to the analysis of multinational individual patient-level cost-effectiveness data to inform reimbursement decisions in different jurisdictions.  His work received the ISPOR Health Economics and Outcomes Research Excellence - Methodology Award in 2008 and several other prestigious scholarships and awards from the BackCare Society  (2004), the Wellcome Trust (2007), and the UK NIHR Academy (2009).

Andrea’s methods research focuses on developing and applying quantitative methods to address the challenges decision-makers face when assessing the value-for-money of healthcare products. This focuses on how to analyse messy health economics and outcomes research and routinely collected data (from both randomised and observational studies) and how to present results to inform policy.   His work involves the use of statistical and decision modelling, quantitative evidence synthesis, simulation and health econometrics methods, including the application of modern causal inference for the analysis of real-world data.  

Andrea has designed and conducted economic evaluation studies for a wide range of health technologies (e.g., therapeutical medical devices, drugs, diagnostics) and interventions (e.g., non-pharmaceutical) in different clinical areas, including oncology, cardiology and respiratory diseases, diabetes, chronic pain, neurology, dermatology, obstetrics and gynaecology.  His research portfolio of applied and methodological research includes competitive grants from national (NIHR, MRC, EPSRC, The Health Foundation, British Heart Foundation, The British Council) and international (European Commission) agencies.   

Research group(s)

• Economic evaluation

Grants

• Health Foundation
  Exploring and quantifying preferences towards self-management support interventions: a mixed-methods survey among individuals with long term health conditions (2014-2015)
• MRC/NIHR Methodology
  Methods of extrapolating RCT evidence for use in economic evaluation models (2010-2012)
• NIHR
  Career Development Fellowship (2010-2013)
• European Union EuroVaQ
  European Value of a Quality Adjusted Life Year (lead:Newcastle University,UK)
• MRC
  MSc +PhDCapacityBuildingGrant (2008-2012)
• NIHR
  Spinal cord stimulation in refractory angina (pilot study)

Supervision

Past PhD students supervised by Andrea Manca

• Manuel Espinoza
• Pedro Goncalves Saramago
• Ronan Mahon
• Thomas Patton

Teaching

Postgraduate

Andrea enjoys engaging in knowledge transfer activities at all levels.  He successfully supervised MSc and PhD students, and early career researchers.  Andrea contributes to the teaching of several short courses for professionals and researchers working in agencies, academia, consultancies, as well as the Pharma and MedTech industries attending from all over the world.

External activities

Memberships

• NIHR Research Fellowship Programme 
  Doctoral Research Fellowships panel member
• UK Health Economics Study Group 
  member
• International Health Economics Association
  member
• Italian Health Economics Association
  member
• International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR)
  member
• NIHR – Programme Grant for Applied Research
  committeemember
• CRUK - National Awareness and Early Diagnosis Research Workstream
  committee member
• National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence
  Member of the Technology Appraisal Committee
• MOMENT study - (NIHR HTA)
  member of the Trial Steering Committee
• Treatment of Back Pain (NIHR Programme Grant)
  member of the Study Oversight Committee

Editorial duties

• Value in Health
  Co-editor
• PLOS One
  Co-Editor

Invited talks and conferences

• Health Technology Assessment
  Drug Information Agency (DiA), Zurich (Switzerland), November 2012
• Maximising the value of access to individual patient level data for decision making
  Key note speech, Danish Health Econometrics Network meeting, Aalborg (Denmark) - November 2012
• The use of pharmacoeconomics to inform healthcare spending rationing decisions
  The University of Turin (Italy)
• Developing economic evaluation methods: assessing the value of access to individual patient level data
  Erasmus University (The Netherlands)
  University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
  University of Maastricht (The Netherlands)
• NICE and the role of economic evaluation in the UK HTA process
  Catholic University of Chile (Chile), August 2010
• Methods to calculate medical costs in Europe: mission impossible?
  International Workshop "Combining Epidemiology and Economics for Measurement of Cancer Costs", Rome (Italy) September 2010
• Regression estimators for (health related) quality of life and QALYs ScHARR
  Health Economics and Decision Science, University of Sheffield
• Multilevel modelling in health economic evaluation: what it is and what it can do for you
  Academic Unit of Health Economics, University of Leeds
• Healthcare cost-effectiveness analysis: Why? Which? What? – A NICE example
  Food and Environmental Research Agency, York
• A bridge over the troubled water: integrating individual patient-level data analysis and comprehensive decision analytic cost-effectiveness modelling
  iBMG & iMTA, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherland
• Fragile - handle with care!   Issues in the long-term term extrapolation of individual patient level data for cost-effectiveness modelling
  MRC Clinical Trial Unit, London