Dr Eva Maria Hodel
Principal Investigator: Pharmacokinetic sub studies
I obtained my diploma in pharmaceutical sciences and the federal diploma for pharmacists from the University of Basel, Switzerland and then went on to do a PhD with Prof Blaise Genton and Prof Hans-Peter Beck at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute at the University of Basel. My PhD research focussed on the effects of pharmacogenetics on pharmacokinetics of artemisinin-based drug combinations in malaria patients. I was involved in study protocol design; filing to ethics committees; data collection and study monitoring while based in Tanzania and Cambodia; data management; technology development (including a microarray-based system for the simultaneous analysis of single nucleotide polymorphisms in human genes involved in the metabolism of antimalarial drugs, i.e. cytochrome P450 isoenzymes and N-acetyltransferase 2, and a LC-tandem mass spectrometry assay for the simultaneous detection of 14 antimalarials and their metabolites in plasma); population pharmacokinetic modelling using a nonlinear mixed-effects modelling approach. Before joining the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) I was working in one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies as a Medical Scientific Liaison Manager in the therapeutic area of arthritis and bone.
When I first joined LSTM, I worked with Drs Ian Hastings, Anja Terlouw, Katherine Kay and Daniel Hayes, on a project funded by the Medical Research Council addressing the methodological question of how best to combine the available sources of pharmacokinetic and trial data on antimalarial drugs and use them to optimise drug deployment policies that produce robust, effective and sustainable drug dosing regimens. As Post-doctoral Research Associate in the group of Dr Anja Terlouw and the Associate Group Head Malaria Pharmaco-epidemiology at the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme (MLW), I was involved in several trials that aim at characterising the cardiac safety of antimalarial treatment when used in programmatic settings (ADJusT, ADAPT1, START-IPT, and STOPMiP). I also led a pooled individual patient safety analysis on antimalarial cardiac safety (IMPACT) with co-investigators from MLW, LSTM, the College of Medicine, the University of Cape Town, and the WorldWide Antimalarial Resistance Network.
