Aim and content

This course is free of charge for PhD students at Danish universities (except Copenhagen Business School), and for PhD Students from NorDoc member faculties. All other participants must pay the course fee.

Anyone can apply for the course, but if you are not a PhD student at a Danish university, you will be placed on the waiting list until enrollment deadline. This also applies to PhD students from NorDoc member faculties. After the enrollment deadline, available seats will be allocated to applicants on the waiting list.

Learning objectives
A student who has met the objectives of the course will be able to:

1. Knowledge: Understand the conceptual principles underlying personalised medicine
2. Knowledge: Have insight into basic genomic testing concepts and terminology, as well as next-generation sequencing
3. Skills: Able to compare pharmacogenetic tests and assess clinical utility
4. Skills: Have methodological insight on how to best identify known heterogeneity within a disease or population and use this information to guide clinical management
5. Skills: Assess the spectrum, prevalance, and impact of mutation(s) on protein function
6. Competences: To put personalised medicine into a larger societal context complementing scientific considerations with economical, legal, and ethical perspectives
7. Competences: Insight into pharmacogenomics and theorise from these data a suitable therapeutic approach and computational drug discovery
8. Competences: Explain driver mutations and companion diagnostics

Content
Personalised medicine (PerMed) is a cross-cutting field that draws on expertise and data from very different disciplines and sectors. PerMed is defined in the European Council Conclusion on personalised medicine for patients (2015/C 421/03) as: “[…] it is widely understood that personalised medicine refers to a medical model using characterisation of individuals’ phenotypes and genotypes (e.g. molecular profiling, medical imaging, lifestyle data) for tailoring the right therapeutic strategy for the right person at the right time, and/or to determine the predisposition to disease and/or to deliver timely and targeted prevention.”

Personalised Medicine requires a specific set of knowledge and skills including insight into genomic analysis, rational drug design and their implementation for tailored medical treatments.

The course is structured in lectures, guided discussions, and related specific practical exercises, and will cover the following topics:
• Genetic variation & genetic disease: Concepts of pathological variations and clinical implications.
• Pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics: Adapting genetic knowledge to personalised diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment
• PerMed in the context of drug discovery, clinical development, production & manufacturing
• Personalizing computational structural drug discovery
• Systems pharmacology and pharmacometrics to understand variability in drug response
• Targeted therapeutics, companion diagnostics, and advanced genome therapeutics
• RCTs and clinical trials in PerMed
• Pharmacovigilance: Register-based data for personalised and stratified medicine
• Cancer biology & cancer genetics
• Omics methods to enable the selection of optimal screening strategies, interventions or therapies
• Legal & ethical issues of PerMed
• Health economical aspects including reimbursement and market access

Common lunch and coffee/refreshments during breaks are included.

Participants
PhD students across multiple fields with an interest in personalised medicine. Basic knowledge of molecular biology is an advantage but not mandatory.

Relevance to graduate programmes
The course is relevant to PhD students from the following graduate programmes at the Graduate School of Health and Medical Sciences, UCPH:

Pharmaceutical Sciences (Drug Research Academy)

All graduate programmes

Language
English

Form
The course consists of lectures, group work, and workshops, presentations and discussions.

Course director
José Moreira, Professor, Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology, jomo@sund.ku.dk
Alexander S. Hauser, Associate Professor, Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology, alexander.hauser@sund.ku.dk

Teachers
José Moreira, Professor, Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology
Alexander S. Hauser, Associate Professor, Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology

Volker Lauschke, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden
Alberto Santos, Head Data Science Platform, DTU Biosustain
Anders Hviid, Professor Statens Serum Institut
Kristoffer Rohrberg, Head of the Phase 1 Unit at Rigshospitalet
Marianne Andersen – Novo Nordisk A/S
Tore B. Stage, University of Southern Denmark
Katharina Ó Cathaoir – Associate Professor – Faculty of Law
Jan Trøst Jørgensen, Director – Dx-Rx Institute

Jukka Rantanen, Professor, Department of Pharmacy
Albert Jelke Kooistra, Associate Professor, Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology
Maurizio Sessa, Associate Professor, Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology
Charlotte Vermehren, Associate Professor, Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology

Dates
24-28, and 31 March 2025

Course location
PharmaSchool, University of Copenhagen, Universitetsparken 2/13 or Jagtvej 160, 2100 Copenhagen

Registration
Please register before 1 February

Expected frequency
Once a year

Seats to PhD students from other Danish universities will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis and according to the applicable rules.
Applications from other participants will be considered after the last day of enrolment.

Note: All applicants are asked to submit invoice details in case of no-show, late cancellation or obligation to pay the course fee (typically non-PhD students). If you are a PhD student, your participation in the course must be in agreement with your principal supervisor.

Disclaimer:
DDSA has explicit permission from Arcanic and the owners of the https://phdcourses.dk/ website to display the courses on ddsa.dk.