Future medicines

Course goals

After finishing successfully the student is able to:​

• Describe the various stages of drug development from preclinical to post-marketing and understand the roles of different stakeholders: patients, doctors, researchers and industry
• Understand at a molecular and posttranslational level how humans differ and how disease differs from health and what the consequences are for innovative therapy or prevention
• Understand personal variation in histocompatibility and in glycans
• Explain what precision medicine means and what it will mean for the pharmaceutical industry and understand the method of diagnosis (including biomarkers) and companion diagnostics
• Think of solutions for the barriers that currently face cell and gene therapy, as well as regenerative medicine
• Assess the limits of “personalised” and of (bio)similarity
• Discuss alternative business models, like drug repurposing

Content

This course is an elective for life sciences students in year two or three of the bachelor programme.
The main trend is towards advanced therapy medicinal products (ATMP), which include biomolecules and cells, focusing on disease modification and on personal differences: personalised medicine. But a better understanding of a person’s characteristics or disease characteristics can also be exploited by repurposing of old medicines.
In this course we will study personalised medicine at several levels. Molecular, cellular, organ, organism, and population. The course starts with an individual assignment of a recent first in class medicine and ends with group assignments on future medicines.
•              Weeks one and two. The latest medicines and how they were developed.
•              Weeks three and four. Drug repurposing.
•              Weeks five and six. Cell and gene therapy and regenerative medicine. 
•              Weeks seven and eight. The self; our compatibility gene.
•              Weeks nine and ten. Glycomics and related diseases.

Additional information

Requirements for active participation.
Class attendance will be monitored during the six weeks of team work. Please mail the coordinator in case of illness, before class starts. Students who do not participate in the presentation and Q&A of their team (which is essentially an exam) do not get a grade. However, if they participated in the majority of the workshops preparing for the team presentation, they can make a substitute assignment with a partial grade maximum of 6.0. Students who participated in the presentation and Q&A of their team, but missed the majority of the workshops preparing for the team presentation, also have a partial grade maximum of 6.0.