Certara, a provider of decision support technology and consulting services for optimizing drug development and improving health outcomes, has announced that Professor Piet van der Graaf, PharmD, Ph.D., its vice president of quantitative systems pharmacology, has been appointed an F1000Prime faculty member. In this new role, Professor van der Graaf will contribute article reviews and recommendations to the Systems & Network Biology Section of the Bioinformatics, Biomedical Informatics & Computational Biology Faculty. He will be responsible for summarizing each article, explaining its value, and adding a rating score.

“I was specifically asked to join F1000Prime to provide an industry perspective on quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP),” said Professor van der Graaf. “QSP combines modeling and simulation and experimental methods to examine the pharmacological response to a drug dose and how that relates to the disease and its progression.”

“QSP is an emerging field that is receiving increasing acceptance from sponsors due to its great potential for helping to ameliorate phase II attrition, and growing attention from global regulators,” Professor van der Graaf added.

Certara launched its first global QSP Consortium in January 2017. Consortium members meet in a pre-competitive environment to co-develop an Immunogenicity Simulator that will predict immunogenicity of biologics and its impact on their pharmacokinetics, efficacy and safety in diverse patient populations.

F1000Prime is a peer-nominated global faculty of the world's leading scientists and clinicians. Faculty members review, rate, and recommend important articles in biology and medical research publications. F1000Prime’s unique rating system is then used to quantify the relative importance of each article.

Established in 2002, F1000Prime originally had 1,000 international faculty members. It has since grown to include more than 8,000 leading experts in biology and medicine. These experts are organized into more than 40 subject-based faculties and subdivided into more than 300 sections. Faculty recommendations are included in a fully searchable database containing more than 100,000 records of the best research available. The faculty contributes an average of 1,500 new recommendations per month.