The latest episode of CertaraTalks features Dr. Mirjam Trame and Dr. Piet van der Graaf being interviewed by Dr. Suzanne Minton on the key moments from the annual meeting of the American Conference on Pharmacometrics, ACoP14! Explore highlights ranging from the dynamic ISOP Trainee Communications Challenge to the groundbreaking use of ArtificialIntelligence in Quantitative Systems Pharmacology.
Transcript:
Welcome to Certara Talks. I’m Doctor. Suzanne Minton. I’m the director of content strategy at Certara. And today, I’m talking to my colleagues, Mirjam, and Piet. So let’s, meet them and learn a little bit more about them, Mirjam. Would you like to go first?
Absolutely. Thank you, Suzanne. My name is Mirjam Trame, and I’m a vice president at Certara, in the pharmacometrics team.
Awesome. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome, Mirjam, and and Piet.
Yeah. Thanks. So I’m Piet van der Graaf. I’m senior vice president and head of QSP at Certara.
Awesome. Delightful to be chatting with both of you this Friday morning.
We had a great time a few weeks ago.
Catching up at the ACOP fourteen, the American Conference on pharmacometrics annual meeting. It was in Maryland, and it was great. So I thought we could chat a bit about some of the highlights of the meeting.
Mirjam, you and I were served as coaches for the IsOP trainee communications challenge, which I thought was so much fun. Can you tell us a little bit more about that experience?
Yeah. Absolutely. It was as you already said, it was a fun session. It was great.
Was really wonderful to to be part of the mentoring of the students. It started off with a boot camp where the students for the first time presented their work to I believe ten coaches, it was, and receive feedback. And then we had one on one sessions prior to ACOP to head the students, reshape their presentations because as we all know, we learn the quantitative skills, during our PhD studies, but communication is always a challenge, especially if you need to communicate to a different audience. So it was, just wonderful to see how all the students did a beautiful job listening to their feed to the feedback from the coaches, updating the slides, and then really accelerating through their talks.
I think they all did a beautiful job and, so looking forward to, seeing this session to continue. And, with this, I also would like to thank again, the journal of PKPD and, to to really sponsor the the prices for the students.
Fantastic. Thanks so much, Mirjam. Piet, I feel like if there’s been one theme of twenty twenty three, I think you could say it’s artificial intelligence. And I know that you gave a talk about the use of artificial intelligence in quantitative systems pharmacology. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Yeah. I did. So I was I was lucky to be part of a session on, innovations in in mobile informed drug development, MITD. And and I’m I was asked to cover the topic integration of, qualitative systems pharmacology or QSP and, AI.
And it was a great session. It was full house, and it was incredibly engaging. There was lots of discussion, lots of questions during the session. And also, afterwards.
And we’ll particularly resonate it’s, during the session also in our demos, later at the Suttara booth. We’ll see the use of AI to link QSP models to the prediction of clinical endpoints, which is really kind of opening up a whole new you know, opportunity for QSP to to really kind of use our models in in later stage clinical developments.
Very exciting. I’m I’m looking forward to seeing how that technology evolves.
Mirjam, one of the neat features about the ACOP meeting is that it incorporates the the cigs, the special interest groups. And I know you’re part of that. How how did that go this year at ACop fourteen?
Yeah.
So I think this year at ACOP fourteen, we had a very unique setup that the organizing committee organized a joint six sessions. So we at ISOP, there is a clinical pharmacometrics, special interest group, a mathematical and computational sciences group, a QSP, as well as the statistics and pharmacometric special interest group. And all these four groups had a combined session, which really highlighted the interconnectedness of the quantitative approaches in our fields. And I think this was one of the highlights this year.
Fantastic.
One of the reasons I was hoping to talk with with you, Mirjam, and you, Piet, is that I feel like you’re kind of in the world of modeling. There’s two sides of the house. Right? There’s the world of mechanistic modeling, which if that’s your world, Piet, and Mirjam, I know you’re you’re a pharmacometrician. That’s an empirical, an empirical approach. So Piet, ACOP is a is an unusual meeting in that both of these sides of the family come together. Can you talk about how this was featured this year at the meeting?
No, it is. Acop is a unique meeting, and and in in, in the world of meetings that cover modeling is my favorite meeting. And it’s really for the reason that you just describe it really blends pharmacometrics and mechanistic modeling very, very well, very balanced. And that means that pharmacometricians and mechanistic modellers kind of meet and talk and think about how we can actually work together, rather than kind of live in parallel universes. So great meeting.
Fantastic. I I agree. Acops is one of my favorite meetings as well. Well, it was great talking to both of you.
Thank you so much, Mirjam, and Piet. You’ve been watching Certara Talks. I’m Suzanne Minton. I’ll see you next time.
