Certara, a provider of software for drug discovery and development has announced that Dr Adam Darwich, has been appointed Certara Lecturer in Precision Dosing at the Manchester Pharmacy School, located at The University of Manchester in England.
This lectureship, which is part of the University's precision medicine initiative, is intended to advance teaching and research of modelling and simulation for individual dose optimisation – with the ultimate goal of providing a more personalised, optimised treatment to patients.
‘While biosimulation has been widely accepted and adopted by biopharmaceutical companies and global regulatory agencies, its implementation in clinical care has been modest to date,’ said Certara chief executive officer Edmundo Muniz. 'We are delighted to have a researcher of Adam's calibre helping to advance this field and teaching these important modelling techniques to the next generation of scientists in drug development and patient care. This lectureship is just one way in which Certara is working to make precision dosing a reality for everyone.’
Later this month, The University of Manchester will host the Health Care Summit on Model-based Precision Dosing, for which Certara is the sole sponsor. During the summit, world key opinion leaders will share their ideas and experiences, and discuss the path forward for implementing biosimulation in individual patient care. Areas of focus include work done across specific population cohorts, including oncology patients, HIV patients, obese subjects, pregnant women, and paediatric patients.
Professor Amin Rostami, chair of systems pharmacology at The University of Manchester and chief scientific officer at Certara, said: 'This event provides a unique opportunity for many renowned thought leaders from across the world, whether they are clinicians or scientists from academia or healthcare sectors, to debate various activities which will facilitate the use of modelling and simulation for precision dosing. This event would not have happened if it was not for the forward thinking of Certara which sponsored it.'
Darwich, who will co-chair the summit together with Rostami, has extensive PK modeling experience, which includes PBPK modelling of drug-drug interactions (DDIs), interspecies extrapolation, and extrapolation to special populations, biopharmaceutics and clinical study design. His previous research focused on PBPK modelling and simulation of oral drug bioavailability in bariatric surgery patients and mechanism-based inhibition of gut wall metabolism.
As part of his new role, Darwich is already partnering with healthcare professionals and other collaborators on a number of projects, including modelling biologics, DDIs and special populations. Manchester is one of six initial regional centres of excellence for The Precision Medicine Catapult, the UK's innovation centre for precision medicine.
