Am I right here?

I want to do a PhD – Am I right here?

The PharMetrX graduate research training program attracts students with diverse backgrounds. This diversity is a strength of the PharMetrX PhD program! During your PhD time, you will deepen your own background and learn more about the other relevant disciplines. You will soon learn to master the communication challenges with scientists from different backgrounds, to feel comfortable within such a heterogeneous research environment and, ultimately, to appreciate that we ‘live transdisciplinarity’.

Common to all PhD students in the PharMetrX program is their general interest in drug development or therapeutic use, in modelling & simulation, and ultimately in striving for better drug therapies in patients. To cope with the different backgrounds, we have designed a specifically tailored training program of different modules. This training program is also open to PhD students from other universities.

To address your potential questions regarding the PharMetrX program more specifically, continue to read depending on your background.

I have a background in pharmacy/pharmaceutical sciences/life sciences

If you are trained in pharmacy, pharmaceutical sciences or life sciences, and as a PhD student you aim to tackle therapeutically relevant questions to foster rationale use of medicines in patients, the PharMetrX PhD program has a lot to offer:

Currently, if a patient takes a drug the complex interaction of the drug, the patient and the disease is rarely fully understood. Do you wish to broaden and integrate your knowledge in anatomy, physiology, pathophysiology, diseases, pharmacology, pharmacotherapy and clinical pharmacy with the aim to better understand the chain of relationships between administered dosing regimen and resulting drug concentration-time course in the body and evoked effect-time course and therapeutic outcome?

Did you know that the underlying mechanisms and processes of the drug-patient-disease interaction you can study by analysing drug concentration, effect and disease progression/cure data over time and you can translate them into so called pharmacometric models? These models help to answer therapeutic questions such as: To which extent does the drug reach the site of action (in the individual patient)? Is the drug concentration of an inhibitor there high enough to inhibit the target? And is the inhibition long enough to cause a beneficial effect? What is the impact of the beneficial effect on disease progression/cure? Why are not all patients responding to the approved standard dosing regimen? How to best dose each patient or each subgroup of patients?

PharMetrX PhD students have a passion for puzzling clinically relevant problems related to pharmacotherapy, have an affinity towards analysing data with software programs, to discuss their results within our groups, with our collaboration partners and to communicate to others.

I have a background in mathematics/statistics

If you are trained in applied mathematics/statistics, the PharMetrX PhD program has a lot to offer. Our general philosophy has been nicely summarized by Rao, Lauffenburger and Wittrup in Nature Biotechnology (2005):

Mathematical modelling offers a formal language for the expression of complex biological knowledge, assumptions and hypothesis in a form amenable to quantitative testing, which is increasingly necessary as the scope and depth of information and uncertainty outpace the capability of unaided intuition.

Our PhD students research in mathematical/statistical areas like scientific computing, numerical mathematics, model reduction, non-linear mixed effect or data assimilation techniques. Typically, the mathematical/statistical questions are motivated by problems in drug discovery, development or therapeutic use:

How to reduce complex models of pharmacologically relevant reaction networks so that the reduced models can be used for parameter estimation? How to use detailed, so-called physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) models to theoretically (as opposed to empirically) derive covariate models? How to develop a firm mathematical ground for commonly used numerical algorithms to estimate parameters from clinical data? How to develop data assimilation techniques tailored to the advent of novel mobile health devices that generate individual patient data on a regular basis?

PharMetrX PhD students have a passion for puzzling biological, pharmacological, mathematical and statistical problems, have an affinity towards data, like to program, and to communicate their results to others.

I have a background in bioinformatics/systems biology

The PharMetrX PhD program has a lot to offer for students trained in bioinformatics or systems biology. Both disciplines quite naturally link into the main application area of the PharMetrX program: drug discovery & development as well as therapeutic use.

Gene regulatory networks, signalling pathways and metabolic networks are key objects of interest. For example, the well-studied epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) system is a prominent target for therapeutic proteins as well as small molecule drugs in cancer therapy. PharMetrX PhD students have researched on how to reduce detailed models of the drug-target system to best understand both, the effect on the target as well as the impact on the drug pharmacokinetics, e.g., with the aim to optimise drug therapy. In addition to the analysis of existing biochemical reaction systems, we also develop novel network models, e.g., to more mechanistically describe the growth of a bacterial population based on key characteristics of the bacterial cells, to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying inflammatory bowel diseases, or to study the evolutionary pressure of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) under anti-retroviral therapy.

Modelling, programming, simulation studies and statistical approaches play a key role in many projects. We use both, stochastic as well as deterministic approaches, e.g, to describe biochemical reaction networks and diverse techniques for their analysis.

PharMetrX PhD students have a passion for puzzling biological, pharmacological, mathematical and statistical problems, have an affinity towards data, like to program, and to communicate their results to others.

I have a background in natural science

If you are trained in natural sciences and as a PhD student you aim to tackle questions of how drugs can be better developed or used in therapy, the PharMetrX PhD program has a lot to offer:

Currently, if a patient takes a drug the complex interaction of the drug (perpetrator), the patient (system) and the disease is rarely fully understood. Do you wish to broaden and integrate your knowledge in biochemistry, signalling pathways/dynamic networks, physiology, pathophysiology and systems characteristics with the aim to qualitatively and quantitatively understand the relationships between the healthy or diseased body at various spacious and temporal levels and the drug input into the system?

Did you know that the underlying mechanisms, processes and networks of the drug-system-disease interaction you can study by analysing drug concentration, effect and disease progression/cure data over time and you can translate them into mathematical models? These models help to answer questions such as: What are the relevant system characteristics for the treatment effect? To which extent does the drug reach the site of action (in the individual patient)? What is the impact of and on the dynamics of the system? Is the drug concentration of an inhibitor high enough for a sufficiently long time to block the drug target?

PharMetrX PhD students have a passion for puzzling clinically relevant problems related to pharmacotherapy, have an affinity towards analysing data with software programs, to discuss their results within our groups, with our collaboration partners and to communicate to others.