A new workshop on physiologically based pharmacokinetic modeling (PBPK) was organised at the UEF School of Pharmacy recently, with the internationally invited lecturers Professor Leon Aarons from the University of Manchester and Assistant Professor Adam Darwich from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden.
PBPK modeling is extensively used during drug development. European Medicines Agency (EMA) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) encourage its use for predicting the performance of the drug model in the patient, supporting initial dose selection, predicting drug-drug interactions, and bringing scientific evidence on the relevant physiology parameters in different populations. The confidence in the utility of PBPK models has increased, and knowledge of such tools is beneficial for students and researchers in pharmacy, toxicology, drug discovery and development, as well as clinical research.
The workshop was successfully received, showing the current growing interest in this topic, with 45 participants from all over Europe, from academia, regulatory medicines agencies, and industry.
Both the basic theory and several applications were dealt with during the workshop, including inter-species scaling from animals to human, and modeling of drug-drug interactions, and hands-on calculation sessions with PK Sim software were included. Moreover, national presenters Dr. Timo Korjamo from Orion Pharma, Dr. Anne Filppula from Åbo Akademi and Dr. Aki Heikkinen from Certara UK, Simcyp Division, provided their insights on PBPK modeling applications.
“Many thanks should be given to the funders of the workshop, especially to our main funder Nordic POP consortium for providing the means to create this scientific, motivating workshop. We hope to organise another workshop in the future after this well-received one,” said the organisers of the workshop, Docent Eva del Amo and University Lecturer Veli-Pekka Ranta.
The Nordic POP consortium is supported by NordForsk programme. The workshop was also funded by the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Eastern Finland, the doctoral programme in Drug Research at the University of Helsinki, and Emil Aaltonen Foundation.
For further information, please contact: Dr Eva del Amo,
https://uefconnect.uef.fi/en/person/eva.del-amo-paez/
