Author: [AUTHOR] Published on 3/1/2018 3:15:00 PM

March 2018 New Member Profile

Pavel Balazki, MSc, PhD, Student Systems Pharmacology at Bayer AG, Drug Discovery, Pharmaceuticals, Systems Pharmacology & Medicine, Saarland University, Saarbruecken, Germany

Pavel first learned about ASCPT through CPT: Pharmacometrics & Systems Pharmacology (PSP). Pavel worked on a mathematical model of insulin receptor activation and cycling for his Master's thesis. While working on that thesis he was trying to decide which direction he wanted to take for his PhD dissertation. His thesis advisor, Dr. Klaus Lindauer, pointed him toward the article “A Generic Integrated Physiologically Based Whole-Body Model of the Glucose-Insulin-Glucagon Regulatory System,” Schaller et al. 2013, published in PSP. He was fascinated by the concept of physiologically based modeling and joined the Systems Pharmacology group led by Dr. Thomas Eissing at Bayer AG (formerly Bayer Technology Services) to work on his PhD dissertation. Dr. Stephan Schaller acts as his advisor. During the time he has been working on his dissertation he has greatly valued PSP as a high-quality journal that publishes innovative material.

In October of 2017, Dr. Stephan Schaller advised him to join the ASCPT community and to attend the Annual Meeting in Orlando. He decided to join ASCPT hoping to extend his professional network with contacts from North America. Coming from Europe, Pavel is curious about how things are done in the US and what topics are of particular interest. He recognizes that there are some cultural and regulatory differences between Europe and the US. He feels that it is important to understand those differences in order to provide solutions for patients throughout the world. Pavel also hopes to improve his ability to prepare manuscripts for publication by getting a better understanding of America's perspective on science.

Pavel is also a part of Professor Thorsten Lehr's group of Clinical Pharmacy at the University of Saarland. In this group he is particularly interested in the use of Systems Pharmacology and computational modeling in developing new medications and treatment strategies. He believes that computational modeling, especially the physiologically based pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics (PBPK/PD) modeling, can save costs and improve the quality of life of patients by enabling individual-based medication.

As part of his PhD dissertation, Pavel is working on a Quantitative Systems Pharmacology PBPK Diabetes Platform, with the support of Bayer AG and esqlabs GmbH. The model of glucose homeostasis and diabetes medication in type 2 diabetic patients will be published open-source at the Open Systems Pharmacology* website to promote the vision of scientific work open for everyone.