PhD Scholarship: Exploration of Novel Modelling Approaches to Establish the Efficacy and Safety of Medicinal Products and Rare Diseases in Children

Funding amount: Refer to advert 

Qualification: Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering (PhD)

Start date: 6th January 2025

Funding for: UK Students for 3.5 years

Supervisor: Professor Mike Chappell

Project Description:

The paediatric population is vulnerable and with high heterogeneity (birth to < 18 years of age) in terms of ontogeny and disease progression. This, along with additional practical and ethical limitations in collecting experimental evidence (mostly data from randomised controlled trials), makes developing drugs for the paediatric population challenging. Current requirements for the approval of medicines for paediatric populations are based primarily on a slowly progressing evidence-generation model that assumes, in many cases, prior clinical experience in an adult reference population. This driver supported the backbone of the EU-funded project ERAMET, which is a multidisciplinary European consortium that also includes drug regulators. This PhD project will support the ERAMET project, and the student will be supervised by experts from the School of Engineering at the University of Warwick (Prof Dr Mike Chappell) and from Certara UK (Dr Amy Cheung). The project aims to explore alternative approaches for evidence benchmarking to establish the efficacy and safety of medicinal products in children. This will be based on the key underlying questions, available data, the mathematical models and modelling methods used, extrapolation strategies and results via simulation to develop innovative methods used in the context of model-informed paediatric drug development. The results of the automated credibility assessment will be reviewed and, if necessary, used to update a Machine Learning (ML) engine so that results comply with the domain expert-based credibility assessment. Simulation tools developed as part of this PhD and the wider ERAMET project will be applied to benchmark the different approaches from the identified cases. The PhD student will specifically be engaged in modelling and simulation work allied to associated data analytics to deal with specific use case exemplar models provided for drugs as specified by the project collaborators, Certara, and more widely within the ERAMET project. The PhD student will also work in collaboration with other work packages within the ERAMET project to implement results achieved on model credibility assessment and documentation of the work performed.

Scholarship:

The award will cover the tuition fees at the UK rate of £4,925, plus a tax-free stipend of £20,140 per annum for 3.5 years of full-time study.

Eligibility:

The candidate should have a good 2.1 Bachelors, or Masters degree in Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science, Physical Sciences or equivalent. This project will suit those with a keen interest in the application of mathematical modelling and data analysis to support drug development.

How to apply:

Candidates should submit a formal application, details of how to do so can be found via the above ‘Apply’ button.

In the application form funding section enter: Source: ERAMET: Professor Mike Chappell 

The University of Warwick provides an inclusive working and learning environment, recognising and respecting every individual’s differences. We welcome applications from individuals who identify with any of the protected characteristics defined by the Equality Act 2010.

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