Paolo Denti will presen the Department of Statistical Sciences seminar with a talk entitled, "Pharmacometrics (quantitative pharmacology) to improve TB/HIV treatment". 

The talk will provide an overview of the basic concepts of pharmacometrics, with some examples from applications to TB/HIV treatment. The talk will first shortly introduce drug development and pharmacology – the study of drug concentration and effect - to then describe the basic concepts of nonlinear mixed-effects modelling used in pharmacometrics, stressing the differences with more traditional data analysis approaches. A brief overview of the modelling process and the diagnostic tools employed will be given. Several examples of the application of pharmacometrics to the analysis of TB/HIV treatment data will be described, ranging from simple pharmacokinetic analyses to more complex analysis of time-to-event data pharmacodynamic data.

Paolo Denti is a researcher in Pharmacometrics at the Division of Clinical Pharmacology, University of Cape Town. He holds a PhD in Bioengineering from the University of Padua, Italy. Since joining the University of Cape Town in 2009, he has been working on pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) modelling to improve our understanding of the relationship between drug exposures and treatment outcomes in tuberculosis, HIV, and malaria, with a focus on drug-drug interactions and dose optimisation in neglected populations, such as children and pregnant women.