Author: [AUTHOR] Published on 11/1/2019 12:00:00 AM

Lulu Chu, PhD, Disease Modeling Scientist, AstraZeneca, Waltham, MA

Dr. Chu’s training was in Biomedical Engineering and basic sciences.  She became aware of ASCPT when she joined the Quantitative Clinical Pharmacology group as a disease modeling scientist at AstraZeneca.  Her colleagues strongly recommended the ASCPT Annual Meeting as a great platform to link the quantitative systems modeling that they have been developing into the context of clinical pharmacology questions.  She looks forward to developing these ties with experts in the clinical pharmacology, pharmacometrics, and QSP communities.

Since joining ASCPT, Dr. Chu has greatly enjoyed the Annual Meeting and Pre-Conference workshops and interactions within the Systems Pharmacology (SP) Community.  She sees the Annual Meeting as a great platform to bring together scientists with different settings and from across academia, industry, and regulatory agencies.  When she was at the Meeting, she met scientists and business leaders who are passionate about applications of systems models including the past SP community chair, Daniel Kirouac, PhD, from Applied BioMath. Dr. Kirouac invited Dr. Chu to join the SP Community Steering Committee, which strives to connect scientists from different companies on a regular basis and aims to bring more awareness of systems pharmacology and its utility to a broader audience in the field.  At the ASCPT 2019 Annual Meeting, Dr. Chu was a speaker.  She describes the experience as “wonderful since it gave [her] an opportunity to share [their] work of using a systems model in addressing late-stage development and life-cycle management questions with the community and to share experiences and thoughts with other speakers and experts, on using systems modeling across various stages of drug research & development.”

Dr. Chu views ASCPT as a great community that enables open discussion and exchange on clinical pharmacology and translational science.  She believes that ASCPT pushes the boundaries of innovation and quantitative sciences to progressively meet the needs of drug development engineering and improved therapeutic options for patients.  She also believes that the Society can be a great tool for the younger generation of researchers. She encourages young scientists to be open-minded and keep learning across different disease and science domains, different quantitative methodological approaches, to progress individually and also to contribute to the continued blending of drug R&D sciences and quantitative analytics.  She believes that “ASCPT provides great professional networking venues for future career development and growth and for identifying the academic and industrial mentors who can broaden your horizon, provide professional socialization and personal support for growth.”

The hyperkalemia modeling work that Dr. Chu presented at the ASCPT Annual Meeting is a great example of where the QSP modeling that she works on impacts patient care.  Their QSP model was used to support decision making and optimize dosing regimens in late-phase clinical trials of Lokelma, for different indications and translating from one patient population type to another.  Their work is something that had not been tested in previous trials.

Dr. Chu has been a member of ASCPT in 2018.