Systems Pharmacology
The Systems Pharmacology group is headed by Prof. Piet Hein van der Graaf. Systems Pharmacology is the quantitative analysis of the dynamic interactions between drugs and a biological system to understand the behaviour of the system as a whole, as opposed to the behaviour of its individual constituents; thus, it has become the interface between pharmacometrics and systems biology.
Systems Pharmacology applies the concepts of Systems Engineering, Systems Biology, and pharmacokinetics-pharmacodynamics (PKPD) to the study of complex biological systems through iteration between computational and mathematical modelling and experimentation.
Our research focuses on:
- Development of specific systems pharmacology models for diseases and pathways of interest to guide target validation and drug discovery and development, for example in immunology and inflammation;
- Development of novel computational and mathematical approaches to develop and explore complex systems models, for example model reduction and frequency-domain response analysis;
- Development of novel experimental approaches for systems pharmacology, such as for example zebrafish and metabolomics;
- Systems toxicology and safety of the cardiovascular system (http://transqst.org/).