How can solving a few differential equations assist us in determining the optimal treatment of patients? This was the first question that triggered the interest of Michiel van Esdonk, PhD, in the field of pharmacometrics during his master’s in Bio-Pharmaceutical Sciences at Leiden University. Working with prof. De Lange, he was introduced to the field of pharmacometrics and worked on an intra-brain distribution model in rats, on which he investigated the effects of changes in cerebrospinal fluid flow. Afterwards, he worked with Dr. Stefanie Hennig at The University of Queensland on the modelling of glycemic control in pediatric type 1 diabetes patients.
In 2015, he started his PhD with the goal to improve model-informed decision making in drug development for acromegaly. He developed new methodology to quantify the PK/PD relationship on pulsatile endogenous profiles in population NLME models. This methodology was applied on the quantification of the inhibitory effects of a novel dopastatin on growth hormone secretion, which was presented at multiple PAGE and ASCPT meetings. He successfully defended his thesis titled ‘The Quantification of Growth Hormone Secretion’ on the 3th of December 2019.
During his PhD, Michiel noticed that there was a (unnecessarily) steep learning curve when getting started in the field of pharmacometrics. In order to provide a platform to share generally used R-codes and to provide free pharmacometric related entry-level tutorials Michiel started the website www.PMXSolutions.com, with topics ranging from creating a prediction corrected VPC in R to getting your NONMEM dataset to work. His website currently attracts over 1000 visitors a month and welcomes all contributions in order to improve the level of documentation in pharmacometrics.
Currently, Michiel works as a pharmacometrician at the Centre for Human Drug Research (Leiden, the Netherlands) with a strong focus on the modelling of phase I clinical trials and improving the efficiency of conducting population PK/PD model analyses.