Hi all, I’m Janice, your SG pharmacometrician. To many of you, pharmacometrics, the study of modeling and simulation of drug levels and their outcomes, probably isn’t a term that comes easily to mind or something that you will regularly come across in daily life. However, a model of a very similar nature exists almost everywhere around us. It is a default app on our phones and laptops, and we will check it before going outside so we can make decisions about what to wear and whether or not to bring an umbrella. This is the weather forecast.

The weather forecast is useful both on individual and governmental scales. At the individual level, it gives us useful information about the weather for the day and if we should bring an umbrella. Weather forecasting can also help us forecast more serious issues such as water supply via predicted rainfall, and disasters such as flooding or hail, and make preparations for it beforehand. Accurate forecasting can thus help to save lives and minimise property damage.

Weather forecasting isn’t done by magic though. Weather forecasts are made by collecting quantitative data about the current state of the atmosphere, land, and ocean and then projecting how the atmosphere will change. However, the atmosphere is chaotic and not all of its processes are fully understood, making weather forecasting a whole science of its own, with its own complex set of predictive models. Pharmacometrics is also a form of forecasting. Using preclincial data, trial data and real world data, pharmacometric models help to integrate and make sense of the patterns within this data to help us forecast potential therapeutic outcomes too. Just that instead of predicting the weather, we can use it for applications such as predicting an effective dose with new drugs or special populations. We can thus use pharmacometrics to tailor drug doses for individual patients and use it to provide important information about a drug’s dosing, efficacy and safety as an important part of regulatory decision making. With an increasing number of new therapies being developed, and patient care getting more complex, pharmacometrics should thus play an even more important role in helping to make decisions in drug development and the push for precision medicine.

The weather app on our phones is so innocuous we hardly give a thought about the amount of science that goes into it just to give us our weekly weather predictions. Similarly, pharmacometrics work often occurs behind the scenes too and we may not be aware that an increasing number of new medications these days rely on pharmacometricians to help push them into the market as safe and efficacious. The dosing instructions at the back of your medicine bottle was probably recommended by a pharmacometrician! Pharmacometrics is not yet mainstream in Asia, though. With the huge push for precision medicine to care for our own population, I do hope that pharmacometrics will find a place and be an important contributor to save lives.