Faculty of Pharmacy

Why does it take twenty minutes from swallowing a headache pill until the headache is gone. And why are children and the elderly prescribed a lower dose of certain drugs? The explanations can be found in the pharmacokinetics of the drug. Pharmacokinetics involves multiple processes. When you swallow a tablet, the drug, like the nutrients in food, must be absorbed into the blood. Once in the blood, the medicine is distributed to different organs. Some organs are target organs for the drug or act as reservoirs, while others remove the drug from the blood. The liver, for example, makes the drug more water-soluble, while the kidneys filter out the drug into the urine. The individual’s age and their physical size affect the extent and duration of these processes. The consequence of this is that the concentration of the drug in the blood varies over time and from person to person. The concentration itself is linked to the drug’s effect, that is, its pharmacodynamics.

In my research, I develop and use mathematical and statistical models to describe pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. My models are used in the development of new drugs to determine the best dose and to adapt the dose for children and the elderly, for example, and to improve how older drugs are used. I am particularly interested in optimising the treatment of patients with Type 2 diabetes to minimise their risk of kidney, cardiovascular and other diseases. This group of patients is often made up of overweight and elderly people. In addition to diabetes, they often have high blood pressure and high lipids. Efforts to lose weight as well as treatment with multiple drugs therefore make optimisation particularly challenging for this patient group.

I have devoted my research career to studying the role of the immune system and the possibilities of treating cancer with immunotherapy drugs. I have done this by focusing on increasing our understanding of how we can improve the efficacy of immunotherapies through the innovative design of new protein and peptide drugs. I have also investigated the efficacy and safety of these drugs in model systems.
Thus, together with research colleagues I have worked to combine different immunological stimuli to create new therapeutic drug candidates. One example of this is the development of a new type of antibody conjugate that both activates and simultaneously targets the immune system specifically to combat cancer cells. We call this Affinity-based Drug Antibody Conjugate (ADAC) technology. This is a drug technology that bonds antibodies with peptides in a unique and innovative way. The goal of ADAC is to facilitate the production of personalised immunotherapies.

My research has also included studies of the safety of new types of protein-based drugs through studies of the candidate in ex vivo systems – systems built up using isolates of blood, cells or tissue from a living organism – in this case a system of fresh human blood. The goal is to reduce the use of animal experiments and improve safety for healthy volunteers and patients participating in clinical studies.

Can you imagine a world without medicines? Probably not. It is thanks to the small drug molecules hiding inside a tablet or solution that we can cure or treat many different diseases. However, there are many diseases that still lack effective treatments and there is a great need for new drugs. The development of new drugs is an incredibly complex and costly search for the perfect molecule. What’s more, less than 1 per cent of projects started lead to approved drugs.

My research aims to improve the development of new drugs with the help of customised chemical tools. We do this by developing unique molecules that can help us visualise biological processes. This allows us to better understand how a disease can arise and how it can be treated with a drug. Our work also includes inventing chemical methods for the production of drug candidates, and new molecules that can be used as starting points for drug development. We have also specifically worked with the production of drug candidates that target bacteria, depression and cancer for example.