Otago student a winner

PhD student Chakradhar Lagishetty was a winner at the recent Population Approach Group in Australia and New Zealand conference.

He was one of six Otago School of Pharmacy students who presented at the conference held in Melbourne, Australia, in February and won the prize for best student presentation.

The conference focuses on methods applied to analysing data and application of methods to learn about the time course of the effects of drugs, how quickly they work, how much effect they have and how long they last. A wide range of people from industry, academia and clinical perspectives attend the conference.

Chakradhar’s project is about covariates (patient characteristics) with an emphasis on identification of biomarkers of aging to predict drug clearance in the elderly.

Chakradhar has previously worked in industry as a research scientist in India for Dr Reddy’s Discovery Research and Advinus Therapeutics. “While working in the pharmaceutical industry I realised the importance of population pharmacokinetics and PKPD correlations (pharmacometrics), this led me to purse a PhD in pharmacometrics.”

The school of pharmacy’s research group in pharmacometrics is led by school dean, Professor Stephen Duffull, and Chakradhar says Professor Duffull’s expertise in this field led him to study at Otago. The other students to attend and present at the conference were Hesham Al-Sallami, Dan Wright, Julia Korell, Abhishek Gulati and Katie Owens.

Article written by Liane Topham-Kindley for Pharmacy Today

PhD student Chakradhar Lagishetty