Modern therapeutics must benefit from the development and large-scale implementation of convenient, user-friendly, miniaturized, integrated instruments enabling drug concentra-tion monitoring and seamless pharmacokinetically guided dosage individualization. Tech-nological advances during recent years make it possible to envisage a portable system, which would allow to perform drug concentration measurement in patients receiving critical treatments. The device should be offered at affordable cost to specialized clinics, and pro-gressively to general practices or even to the patients themselves (as it is already the case for blood glucose determination). Translation of concentration measurement values into personalized treatment advices requires the integration of efficient and ergonomic compu-ter tools into the system. These need to be coupled with communication capabilities, which are nowadays becoming a standard in many aspects of medical care, in order to be con-nected to reference pharmacokinetic-parameters databases.

The project relies on the longstanding experience of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology at CHUV in Therapeutic Drug Monitoring (TDM). During the past decade, this group has played a significant role in the development of new monitoring approaches in various fields of therapeutics (HIV, cancer, fungal infections), and it is now internationally regarded as a center of excellence in this domain. The team will contribute to the project by bringing knowledge and practice about drug dosage individualization, along with technical compe-tences in population pharmacokinetic/ pharmacodynamic analysis, state of the art tools, and expertise currently used for drug analysis in biological matrices.

The ISyPeM2 project has the potential to contribute to different scientific domains, as granted by the high-impact publication records which resulting from the research work of the partners. Concomitantly, ISyPeM2 will be able to target the development of a reliable prototype within the timeframe of the project, thanks to the outstanding engineering skills and the industrial experience of the consortium. Dosage individualization is the key to im-prove cost-effectiveness and efficacy of medical treatments worldwide. For this reason, the ISyPeM2 project raised the interest of the World Health Organization. Indeed, the po-tential impact of an affordable POC system for TDM in decreasing costs and improving treatment efficacy of HIV in developing countries will be consistent.

The REDS team role is to develop the software for the interpretation of drug concentration in blood and the dosage adaptation. This subproject will end up with the creation of the E-zeCHieL software. The software architecture, after a couple of iterations in order to vali-date the various concepts, is now taking a new shape. It will ease the deporting of calcula-tion on remote machines, and also allow for a certification as medical software. A particu-lar accent is given on the efficiency of the mathematical calculations, to allow a light ver-sion to be embedded within the PoC, on which limited processing power will be available.

More details about the EzeCHieL software can be found here.