About us

We are the Clinical Pharmacy group at Saarland University. We develop mathematical models that predict how a drug works in a particular person, and we bring these models into clinics, pharmacies and drug development.

Prof. Dr. Thorsten Lehr has led the group since 2012. Today about 20 people work with us, and 17 doctoral theses and 44 master's and diploma theses have been completed here. During the pandemic, our COVID-19 Simulator was accessed up to 200,000 times a day at its peak.

Research

Our models describe how drugs are absorbed, distributed and eliminated in the body, and how genes, co-medication, time of day or disease change this. From this we derive doses for individual patients. In addition, we run clinical trials such as CONTAIN and take part in projects such as EUVABECO, DREAM-EP, TWIN-EB and the EU project SafePolyMed, which we coordinated. Research

Teaching

We teach pharmacy students clinical pharmacy, anatomy and physiology, pathology, and pharmacoepidemiology and pharmacoeconomics. In our training pharmacy they practise patient counselling on realistic cases. Teaching

Open, connected, applied

  • Open: Our PBPK models are freely available, via Open Systems Pharmacology and in our GitHub repository. Videos on PK-Sim are available under Tutorials.
  • Connected: Thorsten Lehr is a member of the Open Systems Pharmacology Management Team and served on the Saarland state government's COVID-19 expert council from 2020 to 2023. We are part of the COST Action PERCC on chronotherapy and were a partner in the IMI project DIRECT on type 2 diabetes.
  • Applied: In 2019, Thorsten Lehr co-founded Saarmetrics GmbH, a spin-off of the university that offers pharmacometric services for drug development. How to work with us is described under Collaboration.

And the raccoon? It stands for the way we work: we dig through studies and databases until we find the data a model needs. More on our YouTube channel.