Description
Period: Oct 25 – Nov 12, 2010
Clinical pharmacology is the discipline involved in the research and development of (new) medicines. Over the last two decades the discipline has evolved considerably due to a couple of simultaneously occurring developments.
Each of these developments will be addressed in the course. It will for instance be reviewed why there has been an exponential increase in the identification of possible ‘drugable’ targets and why this has not necessarily translated into drug targets. Another interesting development is the greater emphasis on biomarkers to assess drug action in humans. This development, its advantages and its problems will be discussed. The role of pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics in current drug development as well as the exercises that are performed to link drug concentrations to drug effects will be addressed in this course. The hope inspired by these developments is that in the near future we enter the era of ‘personalized medicine’. This term has been coined to indicate that it should be possible to treat each individual patient with a personally tailored treatment. Finally, the course aims to make the participants familiar with the current legal and regulatory requirements for drug research in humans.
The course program will consist of plenary (informative) lectures, workgroups, self-study assignments and a classroom experiment in which the participants will perform a phenotyping and genotyping experiment to assess the metabolic capacity using their body materials (buccal swab).
The deliverable of the course will be that the participants have a greater insight in the application of novel techniques that are applied in pre-clinical and clinical drug research.