Individualized Drug Therapy for Patients

Roger Jelliffe MD, FCP, FAAPS, an adult cardiologist, developed the first software, for individualizing digitalis dosage, in 1967. He founded the USC Laboratory of Applied Pharmacokinetics and directed it until he retired and had recruited Dr. Michael Neely, who became director in 2013. The laboratory has developed what is now the USC Pmetrics software for population modeling and the Bestdose clinical software for individualizing drug dosage regimens specifically with maximum precision, including several different Bayesian methods for managing individual patients in various clinical situations. The laboratory has contributed significantly to optimize therapy for cardiovascular, bacterial and fungal diseases, transplants, and for acutely ill and unstable patients in the ICU. Dr. Neely is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and a Clinical Scholar at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, CA. He is a board-certified pediatric infectious diseases physician with an active clinical practice at the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles (CHLA). His research interests are in pediatric clinical pharmacometrics, including population pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic modeling, pharmacogenomics, simulation, and most importantly, use of models to optimize therapy for individual patients. He is currently the Director of the Laboratory of Applied Pharmacokinetics and Bioinformatics at the CHLA Saban Research Institute. LAPKB is a multidisciplinary team of physicians, mathematicians, statisticians, engineers, and information technologists, who are leading experts in non-parametric population modeling and multiple-model Bayesian adaptive control of therapeutic drug regimens in individual patients. LAPKB maintains the freely available Pmetrics pharmacometric package for R, and the BestDose software for individualized dosing. LAPKB has numerous local, national and international collaborators. Dr. Neely has a Master's of Science Degree in Clinical and Biomedical Investigations at USC, is a Fellow and Regent in the American College of Clinical Pharmacology, a member of the Society for Pediatric Research, and he consults on the United States Food and Drug Administration Anti-infective Drug Advisory Committee. He is currently the principle investigator on two NIH-sponsored clinical projects involving the developmental aspects of voriconazole pharmacokinetics, as well as creating software tools to optimally dose voriconazole, vancomycin, and other therapeutic drugs. He mentors numerous trainees and visiting scholars, is an invited speaker worldwide, and is the author of over 80 peer-reviewed papers.