Elizabeth Thompson
Duke University, NC·Pharmacology·Early-career
Choosing the right drug dose for a critically ill baby is surprisingly hard. Infants with heart disease often suffer from low cardiac output, meaning the heart pumps too little blood, which causes serious illness and death.
- Fields
Pharmacology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Mathematics & Statistics
- Topics
pharmacokinetics
pharmacodynamics
PK/PD modeling
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2029
What they work on
- Identify the best-performing population pharmacokinetic model of milrinone, a drug that helps the heart pump, by externally validating existing models against prospectively collected real-world data from an independent group of critically ill infants.
- Develop an advanced PK/PD model of how milrinone dose, drug exposure and patient response interact in infants with heart disease, accounting for time-varying patient factors captured by high-frequency ICU data.
- Prospectively validate the milrinone exposure-response relationships in a multicenter observational group of critically ill infants.
More about the research
Drugs called inotropes, such as milrinone, help the heart pump harder. Current dosing, however, often leads to treatment failures or toxic side effects. Doses are based on pharmacokinetics (PK), how the body absorbs and clears a drug, usually measured at a single time point. This misses the large changes in physiology that occur during critical illness. It also misses differences in pharmacodynamics (PD), how strongly a patient responds to the drug, and the way a drug's effects can in turn change how it is handled.
Why it matters
Critically ill infants with heart disease who receive milrinone can suffer when standard doses are too low to help or high enough to cause toxicity. A systematic method that uses routinely collected intensive care data to model drug levels and responses over time could make dosing safer and more effective. The same approach could later be applied to other drugs used in critically ill children.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
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The school
Duke University: 61 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 417 research doctorates a year.
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