France Mentré new honorary doctor at the Faculty of Pharmacy
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France Mentré, Professor of Biostatistics at INSERM – Paris Diderot University in France, has been appointed honorary doctor at the Faculty of Pharmacy. She develops methods for optimising model-based design and analysis of clinical pharmaceutical studies. For instance, during the Ebola epidemic she contributed calculations which formed the basis for how the new Ebola drugs were to be dosed.
France Mentré is a biomathematician, a biostatistician and a physician. The goal of her research has been to extract as much relevant information as possible in an ethical, practical and cost-efficient way. The basis for doing so rests on mathematical models which describe the course of events in underlying physiological, pathophysiological and pharmacological processes. Such models can allow integrating different kinds of patient data: from the level of medical substances in the blood and how these affect the patient’s physiology, markers of the disease progression to symptoms and survival.
The purpose of these calculations is to determine the connection between therapy and response and to deduce to what extent patients react differently to the treatment. If the differences between patients is large, the models can also form a basis for how best to individualise treatments.
Due to the large amounts of data and the often complicated models, the calculations are often complex. France Mentré has contributed by developing calculation methods for these models. She has also been a pioneer of how to, in the most informative way, design the studies which are to be the foundation of the data collection, and how to evaluate whether the suggested mathematical models are adequate descriptions of the collected data. She has also applied her methods, especially for cancer and infection treatments. As an example, during the Ebola epidemic she contributed the calculations which formed the basis for how one of the new treatments now being used, favipiravir, is now dosed.
France Mentré has cooperated and still cooperates in different ways with researchers and PhD students at Uppsala University. For instance, six PhD students at the Department of Pharmaceutical Biosciences have had their half-way seminar at the Paris Diderot University, and she has published nine studies together with researchers at Uppsala University.
The Conferment Ceremony will be held in the University Main Building on 26 January 2018.
Linda Koffmar