On December 3, 2019 our colleague Michiel van Esdonk successfully defended his PhD thesis ‘The Quantification of Growth Hormone Secretion – Application of model-informed drug development in acromegaly’ at Leiden University.
To understand the clinical pharmacological properties of a (new) treatment modality, it is highly important to quantify its effect on the human body. This is usually done by quantifying the relationship between the concentration of the drug and the response of the biological system. The biological system should therefore first be correctly characterised without a drug present. However, this becomes difficult when the biological system is pulsatile over time and varies widely between individuals, as is the case for growth hormone (GH). In his thesis, Michiel addresses five key topics regarding the quantification of GH in literature and the application in (future) clinical trials, including a new deconvolution-informed population pharmacodynamic model for the quantification of drug effects on pulsatile profiles, and a population model for the simulation and quantification of pulsatile GH profiles in acromegaly patients and healthy subjects. These models can be used to facilitate decision-making and improve the design of clinical trials when investigating GH secretion in drug development.
Michiel’s PhD program was a joint project between CHDR and the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research of Leiden University. He was supervised by professors Piet Hein van der Graaf and Koos Burggraaf, and his co-promotor dr Jasper Stevens.
For more information, please reach out to us, or stay tuned for the online version of his thesis.
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