Research & Projects

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• Clinical and Translational Tuberculosis
• Pediatric Infectious Diseases and Malaria
• HIV Prevention

Clinical and Translational Tuberculosis

The Savic Lab aims to develop translational platforms able to predict drug exposure levels and efficacy in clinical studies and, thereby, to optimize dosing. The lab is making progress toward shifting the focus of the clinical development of new tuberculosis drugs from basic safety and efficacy to specific safety endpoints that will reduce the amounts of trials, subjects, and time necessary for drug approval. This will enable new safe and efficacious therapies to be brought to market more quickly and with more efficiency and will prevent unnecessary deaths due to drug resistance and treatment failure.

• Clinical TB:Model-Based Analysis of Tuberculosis Biomarkers

• Clinical TB:Nonlinear Mixed-Effects Modeling of Rifapentine PK and PD

• Systems Model of TB Including Translation from EBA Study to Clinical Trial Efficacy

• Phase-IIA Early Bactericidal Activity (EBA) Studies

• Modeling Pyrazinamide Lesion-Specific Pharmacokinetics and Efficacy from Rabbit Data

• TBI-223 Model for Human Translation

• Optimizing Clofazimine (CFZ) for TB in Children

• Translational Baseline Model

Pediatric Infectious Diseases and Malaria

The Savic Lab is working to optimize anti-infective treatment and prevention strategies for vulnerable populations. Our goals are to improve understanding of the unique treatment needs of children – especially those made vulnerable due to HIV and malnutrition – in order to eliminate preventable deaths due to infectious diseases in resource-limited settings and to recommend evidence-based policy changes to anti- infective indications, choices, and dosing regimens for vulnerable populations.

• Pharmacokinetic/Pharmacodynamic Research for Optimal Dosing Regimens for Children

HIV Prevention

The Savic Lab’s goal is to optimize the prevention of HIV infection through PK/PD modeling and simulation. To accomplish this, we are working to identify and reach those most vulnerable and at risk of HIV infection, and identify optimal treatment and formulation options through considering alternative target drug concentrations and individual commitment to adherence in order to establish a quantitative relationship between tenofovir levels and HIV prevention.

• Mechanistic Assessment of HIV Growth in Tissue Explant Samples

• Individual Level Data Meta-Analysis from Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) Clinical Trials