Here, we talk to the newest member of Certara’s Simcyp Scientific Advisory Board (SAB), Professor Jennifer B. Dressman, PhD, who is also professor of Pharmaceutical Technology and director of the Institute of Pharmaceutical Technology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany.
Professor Jennifer B. Dressman, PhD, member of Certara’s Simcyp Scientific Advisory Board (SAB)
Professor Jennifer B. Dressman
1. Could you briefly describe yourself?
I was born in Australia and earned my Bachelor of pharmacy degree there. Although I started my Master’s degree there, Professor Takeru Higuchi, the father of modern pharmaceutics in the US, invited me to move to the University of Kansas (KU). After I graduated with my PhD from KU, I joined Burroughs Wellcome in Greenville, North Carolina in their R&D area. I spent about two-and-a-half years in the pharmaceutical industry before being appointed assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s College of Pharmacy. All told, I spent 11 years in Michigan before moving to Frankfurt.
I was on sabbatical at the University of Paris in 1992, when I was invited to give a seminar at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt by Jörg Kreuter, a former visiting scientist at the University of Kansas, and at that time the Goethe University’s Professor of Pharmaceutical Technology. It was after that seminar, when I was chatting with the faculty, that they asked me if I would be interested in a professorship there. I was delighted by the invitation but had to confess that I didn’t speak any German!
So, we struck a deal. The professors agreed that I could spend the first year learning German and not teaching, but after that, all my lectures and exams had to be in German!
I took a crash course in German at the Goethe Institute and, fortunately, it all worked out.
2. Please describe your average day in five words.
I can describe it in three words: busy, busy, busy!
3. At what point did you decide to be involved in the pharma market?
I had my first pharmaceutics class during my second year at the Victorian College of Pharmacy (now the Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Monash University). It was kind of intuitive and that definitely piqued my interest. I began talking to the presenter, senior lecturer Richard Oppenheim, PhD, about becoming my supervisor and joined his research group as a Master’s student two years later.
4. What has been your biggest achievement?
Pioneering biorelevant media and biorelevant dissolution testing, a pharmaceutics tool that relates in vivo performance to formulation for oral drugs. It can produce physiologically-relevant results by simulating gastrointestinal (GI) conditions in the fed or fasted state, and also in different parts of the GI tract. This type of dissolution testing also takes into account factors such as hydrodynamics and transit time through the different GI segments. For example, if you are designing a dosage form to release a drug over 12 or 16 hours, then you definitely need to know how it will be absorbed in the upper, middle and lower part of the GI tract.
Of particular importance for the large number of drugs that are poorly soluble, we determined that dissolution is mediated by bile salts in the intestine, so we added surfactants and bile salts to the dissolution media. We also recognised the impact of pH, gastric emptying, fed and fasted state, and viscosity on drug absorption. By taking a multifaceted approach, working with in-vitro tools, animal models and studies in humans, we have been able to optimize the design of biorelevant dissolution testing.
5. What would you say is your worst trait?
It's the flipside of one of my best traits, which is persistence. If you're not careful, persistence can quickly turn into stubbornness!
6. What do you love about your job?
I enjoy the variety, the combination of teaching, research, writing papers and consulting. They all feed into each other and make me a better all-around scientist.
7. If anything, what would you change about your job?
The oral exams. We have oral exams at the end of the eight semesters and either you pass them or you don't. You get three tries. It's a pleasure when the students are really good and you can swing through the questions and they keep up with you with no problem. But it's heartbreaking having to fail people who really aren't up to it, even though they've been studying pharmacy for eight, 10 or even 12 semesters. They are so disappointed, it's horrible. That said, we have a commitment to the public to make sure that only people who are up to it, who are competent, graduate as pharmacists.
8. If you weren’t in the pharma industry what job would you like to do?
It would be interesting to be a scientific journalist, trying to distil a scientific area into an article that's easy to understand and engaging for the lay public.
9. What challenges do you foresee being important over the next 10 years?
The number one challenge for pharmacy in general will be to develop new antibiotics and establish better methods of avoiding the development of resistance to them. It would also be great to find injection-free ways to deliver biologicals.
Also — it’s a no-brainer in the pharmaceutical sciences — trying to improve efficiency in new drug development – better compound selection, fewer failures in a clinic — is always the goal. It's been a challenge for at least the past 20 years and it will continue to be a challenge going forward.
Maintaining an effective drug supply at an affordable cost on a global basis is also a major challenge. That means having effective generics and biosimilars.
Last but not least, communicating to patients the importance of taking their drug at the right time on a regular basis. A lot of therapeutic failures result from patients not being compliant with the dosing regimen.
10. In your opinion, what will offer the biggest opportunities in the future?
Part of the reason that I joined the Simcyp SAB is because I believe that the integration of physiologically-based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) and pharmacodynamic (PD) modelling across the board is the key to future success in both drug development and regulatory applications. It can also help to reduce the industry’s reliance on experimentation in animals.
PBPK and PD modelling will lead to safer medicine use. They will allow us to explore how a particular drug will work in males and females, old and young, people of different ethnicities, fast and slow metabolizers, and in the fed and fasted state.
As you can't conduct all those clinical studies before a new drug application is approved, it will be important to use PBPK and PD modelling to explore what would happen in the different patient groups, to determine who should be taking the drug at what dose, so that doctors can prescribe the drug correctly for any and all of their patients.