Category Archives: Uncategorized
Nobel prize-winning neural nets and pharmacometrics
As a (mostly) computational scientist, I was excited to see both the Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry being awarded for computational work last week. In particular, the Physics price on Artificial neural networks, a fundamental building block in many … Continue reading
How can pharmacometrics benefit clinical practice and vice versa?
Last weekend, I had the privilege of speaking about my work in pharmacogenomics at the Singapore Pharmacy Congress. It was a good time of getting to meet old friends and network with the new generation of pharmacists. Just as how … Continue reading
A quick visual check for saturated clearance
In many animal studies, a wide range of doses are often used. At high doses, it is possible to have way more drug than its clearance pathway can handle, resulting in less drug than expected being eliminated. This is called … Continue reading
Direct vs Indirect effect models
When you take a drug, the drug needs time to be absorbed after, it needs to reach the effect site and then cause a biological process to happen before an effect occurs. All these processes take time. Some of them … Continue reading
Artificial sweetener choices – to absorb or not to absorb?
Artificial sweeteners are in the news again regarding potential new health risks. In particular, xylitol (a common artificial sugar) has been called into question as a prothrombotic (causing an increased risk of blood clots and thus stroke and heart attacks) … Continue reading
A sticky situation
Researchers, if your compound It’s not your next big hit. It could be an aggregator instead. These are some general pointers for flagging out false positives when screening for new hits (B. Shiochet PMID: 16793529). As PK scientists, this is also … Continue reading
How do I know two drugs can be safely taken together? – understanding drug-drug interactions
In my previous life as a pharmacist, many patients used to ask if it was safe to take two medications they were prescribed together. Unless otherwise stated e.g. explicit instructions were given to take the medications at least 2 hours … Continue reading
What are enteric-coated tablets, and how does enteric coating affect PK?
Most tablets and capsules taken by mouth enter the stomach and dissolve there, before entering the small intestine for absorption. On the other hand, enteric-coated tablets are designed with a special coating to allow the medication to pass through the … Continue reading
How can our genes affect drug levels?
We all respond to drugs differently. As many of you have pointed out while using the coffee simulator https://janicegoh.shinyapps.io/CoffeeSimulator/ over the past few months, the profile shown there does not always accurately describe your experience with coffee. This is because … Continue reading
Top down vs bottom up pharmacokinetic (PK) modeling – a soft intro
To a person new to PK modeling, understanding the differences between population PK modeling (top down) and physiologically based PK (PBPK) (bottom up) modeling might be confusing. Hopefully, this analogy can help you out. Let’s say you wanted a new … Continue reading
Singapore Pharmacometrics 