Optional Half-day Courses

The passage of drugs across membranes: without transport vs. by passive transport vs. by active transport.

Transporters in Drug Development

Half-Day Course 

Membrane transporters are critical determinants of drug disposition, response, and toxicity, and increasingly are being targeted in drug discovery. This half-day workshop will, through lectures and interactive problem-solving, focus on transporters in the Solute Carrier and ATP Binding Cassette Superfamilies (Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 9, 215-236, 2010), including fundamentals of transport mechanisms and kinetics, in vitro methodology for studying those mechanisms, FDA guidances for studies of transporter-mediated DDIs, and transporter polymorphisms. The emphasis will be on emerging transporters, and case based problems. (Instructors: Kathy Giacomini (UCSF), Deanna Kroetz (UCSF), and Eugene Chen (Genentech)

A pharmacokinetic population model. Once established, models such as this can enable individualization of drug therapy for a specific patient to be more finely focused.

Introduction to Population Pharmacokinetics

Half-Day Course 

Population Pharmacokinetics is the study of sources of variability in drug disposition and effects. It seeks to characterize quantitatively both the distribution of pharmacokinetic behaviors (and drug effects) throughout a population of subjects, and the separate contributions to that distribution by component subpopulations (see adjacent figure). It is an area of strong research interest, it is common practice in drug development, and it is often used in comprehensive PK/PD modeling, particularly to support simulations of future trials. This course will introduce participants to the concepts and important applications, provide an understanding of the components of population PK, and allow simple calculations that reinforce the concepts. It will also introduce participants to NONMEM® (Icon®), a widely used program for population PK. Due to time constraints, the latter aspect will be strictly didactic and NOT hands-on. (Instructor: Nancy Sambol)