Thanks to pharmacometricians like UMKC School of Pharmacy alumnus Seth Berry (Pharm.D. ’00), medications go through more vetting before they undergo a clinical trial, making the process as smooth as possible.

“In pharmacy school, I was always taught you are treating one patient: the patient in front of you,” Berry said. “But in pharmacometrics, we’re looking at the population at large while identifying subsets of people that need a dosage adjustment.”

According to Dean Russell Melchert, Ph.D., it’s an exciting time for pharmacists, due in part because of alumni like Berry, who are advancing the field into new areas.

“Community pharmacists play an extremely important role in providing access to high-quality care,” Melchert said. “However, only about half of our pharmacy graduates go into community pharmacy. The rest of our graduates take on exciting careers in many different areas, including pharmacometrics.”

As the principal pharmacometrician at Momentum Metrix, an Omaha, Nebraska, pharmaceutical research company, Berry works closely with pharmaceutical companies – from small biopharma companies to large pharmaceutical corporations – on the clinical trials they perform using statistical analysis to study the data on how patients respond to specific doses of a trial drug.

As the data comes in, he simulates drug interactions and predicts how individual patients will fare by incorporating vast amounts of demographic data that may affect how a patient reacts to a medication. Those demographics can be data points like age, weight and gender, but can also be other specific data such as particular disease states that could affect medication’s absorption.

Berry then consults with health-care providers to make sure the recommendations are feasible for clinicians to implement in the real world.

According to Berry, the data analysis is hugely beneficial to the public because it helps ensure successful clinical trials.

“We can take all these different statistical models and predict the outcomes of the clinical studies,” Berry said. “It’s a great way to optimize these studies so that we don’t subject individuals to any unnecessary risk of giving them too high a dose.”