What is Precision Pharmacotherapy Research? (PPR)
Precision Pharmacotherapy Research Moves Away From a One-Size-Fits-All Approach to Treating Patients.
Instead, PPR researchers use patient factors, such as demographics, kinetics, genetics, metabolomics, and proteomics, to identify what causes some patients not to respond to treatment or experience side effects.
Is the PPR Track Right For You?
- You are interested in tailoring medication selection, dosage and timing to individual patients based on their unique characteristics.
- You are curious why a medication may or may not be effective, or may cause side effects, based on the unique makeup of individuals (e.g., disease and therapeutic phenotyping).
- You want to determine why some medications work for one person but not for another.
- You are passionate about patients’ individual genetic makeup or what pre-medication biochemical signals (e.g., bloodwork and lab levels) predict response to medications.
Precision Pharmacotherapy Research Is a Research Track You Can Pursue in the Clinical Pharmacy Translational Science PhD Program.
You might wonder, what are some PPR research topics and methods? Let's share a few.
- Clinical Biomarkers (Age/Nutrition/Body Size)
- Drug Concentrations (Pharmacokinetics)
- Drug Responses (Pharmacodynamics)
- Patient Genetics (Pharmacogenomics)
- Biochemical Biomarkers (Pharmacometabolomics, Pharmacoproteomics)
- Clinical Translation and Implementation
- Precision Dosing
- Pre-Clinical Studies
- Data Mining and Analysis
- Analytical Chemistry
- Artificial Intelligence
- Machine learning
- Biobanks
- Secondary Data Analysis
- Clinical Trials
- Observational Studies
- Advanced Statistical Techniques
Our Faculty Are Experts and Eager to Mentor You.
Specific Patient Populations
Execute translational clinical pharmacology research that focuses on underrepresented patients in clinical trials, specifically people with obesity or with liver or kidney insufficiency. Research in this space focuses on getting the right dose to the right person to ensure medicines are safe and effective.
Into Cancer Treatment
Explore how a patient’s genetics or other biomarkers influence their response to cancer drugs, focusing on the prevention of chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN) or severe chemotherapy toxicity (DPYD Testing).
Medication Outcomes with Pharmacogenomics
Center your research on patient genetics and their responses to cardiovascular medications like those for heart failure, high cholesterol, abnormal heart rhythms and heart attacks, with the overall goal of improving cardiovascular medication outcomes using precision medicine.
Pulmonary Delivery of Therapeutic Proteins
Specialize your research on critical illnesses, particularly Sepsis and Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS). The goals of this type of research include using metabolomics to:
- Understand what drives responses to specific pathogens in critical illnesses.
- Identify biomarkers in the blood that predict therapeutic response.
- Find metabolic patterns or genetic differences (patient phenotyping).
- Identify biomarkers to improve targeted pharmacotherapy.
Get experience in research that involves integrating high-throughput genomic, proteomic, and metabolomic data to identify key biomarkers underlying interindividual variability in pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. A central component of this work is the development and application of advanced statistical and machine learning models to translate complex multiomics data into clinically actionable tools that enhance therapeutic safety and efficacy.