Dr. Karen Rowland Yeo, senior vice president, Client & Regulatory Strategy, Certara UK Symcyp Division describes how pioneering biosimulation is helping to predict drug exposures during pregnancy, providing opportunities for safer care and better outcomes.
Key insights:
- A greater understanding of how drugs can affect the body of a pregnant woman and, how they could affect the unborn child, is crucial to being able to design and develop pregnancy-suitable medicines.
- PBPK modelling could overcome many of the challenges of pregnancy drug trials - representing a mechanistic approach to predict the pharmacokinetics of drugs in different populations.
- The modelling can be used to predict drug exposures in both mothers and breastfed infants while accounting for complex factors such as genetics, co-medications and time varying physiology.
Lack of research into pregnancy and reproductive health can have a significant effect on the ability to provide novel therapies and interventions which can save lives and relieve suffering for many mothers and babies.