This podcast format is inspired by the Charles Dicken’s novella “A Christmas Carol” whereby Phil Jeffrey (Bicycle Therapeutics), Beth Williamson (UCB) and Daniel Price (Nimbus) discuss DMPK Past, Present and Future with Scott. Key elements discussed include the evolution of DMPK as a predictive discipline that links helps the chemistry of drug design with the biology of drug disposition and effect.

The episode addresses the following questions:

• The founding names and principles of DMPK and the emergence of Discovery DMPK
• Today’s use of technologies and in silico modelling and DMPK’s role in the 3 pillars/5Rs and PK/PD
• The outlook for better prediction with advances in AI/ML

Speakers:
Phil Jeffrey - Senior Vice President of Preclinical Development at Bicycle Therapeutics

Phil Jeffrey is now semi-retired after contributing to DMPK for over 35 years in the pharmaceutical industry.  Most recently, Phil was Senior Vice President of Preclinical Development at Bicycle Therapeutics and previously has held positions at Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, SmithKline Beecham and The Upjohn Company.  Phil is a longstanding contributor the Society for Medicines Research and is an Honorary Professor at the William Harvey Research Institute, Queen Mary University of London.  Phil has a wide breadth of experience across DMPK from, Drug Discovery and early lead optimisation through to clinical proof of mechanism and proof of concept across a wide variety therapeutic areas and drug modalities and made significant contributions to the advancement of understanding the CNS penetration of drugs into the brain.

Beth Williamson - Head of ADME in the DMPK group at UCB

Beth graduated with a PhD in Pharmacology from the University of Liverpool and is now Head of ADME in the DMPK group at UCB where she also represents DMPK on projects throughout discovery and development. Beth’s work has focussed on in vitro and in vivo ADME assay optimisation and validation within drug discovery, particularly to address bespoke questions. Beth has worked in the fields of oncology, neurology and immunology. Her main research interests include drug-drug interactions, extrapolation of pre-clinical in vitro and in vivo data for the prediction of human pharmacokinetics and application of AI/ML approaches within DMPK. 

Daniel Price - Vice President of Computational Chemistry & Structural Biology at Nimbus Therapeutics

Dr. Daniel Price is Vice President of Computational Chemistry & Structural Biology at Nimbus Therapeutics, where he leads a team of internal and external scientists focused on delivering breakthrough medicines through structure-based design, leveraging both physics-based and knowledge-based predictive modeling. Before joining Nimbus, he spent 16 years at GlaxoSmithKline, where he led a team of computational chemists and data scientists across diverse areas of structure- and ligand-based drug design, high-content screening analytics, predictive ADME, predictive synthesis, and chemogenomics. He has led drug discovery programs, contributed to 4 clinical candidates, led the development of GSK’s first generation R&D data lake, and authored/co-authored 26 publications. Dr. Price received his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from University of Colorado at Boulder followed by his Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry from Yale University with Prof. Bill Jorgensen. He completed an NIH postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. Charlie Brooks, III at The Scripps Research Institute prior to joining GSK.

Stay tuned for more podcasts in our Pharmaron DMPK Insights Series!