This July, the PMX Africa – Egypt Chapter ran its first Clinical Pharmacology & Pharmacometrics Course, delivered in partnership with the Faculty of Pharmacy at Future University in Egypt (FUE), and sponsored by DAF. What began as an idea to make quantitative pharmacology more accessible across the region turned into a two-weekend programme that reached hundreds of learners across four continents—and, by every measure we tracked, left them wanting more.
A hybrid design, built for reach and depth
The course was structured in two parts so it could do two things at once: reach broadly and go deep.
Weekend 1 (10–11 July, online) was open to all accepted participants and covered the foundations: from the pharmacokinetics of absorption, distribution and elimination, through dosing at steady state, non-compartmental analysis and bioequivalence, pharmacodynamics, regression analysis, and a first introduction to population PK modeling.
Weekend 2 (17–18 July, onsite at FUE) was an intensive, hands-on lab for a smaller hybrid track cohort, working directly in R: exploratory data analysis, NCA, population PK model building with nlmixr2, R Shiny, and interpreting model outputs.
The idea was simple: give everyone a strong conceptual grounding online, then give a committed group the chance to put a keyboard under their hands and actually build models.
Registration was open for just two weeks in June and drew 388 applications from across Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and beyond. After review, 312 applicants were accepted, and online attendees joined live from 26 countries, with Egypt, India, Nigeria, South Africa and Uganda leading participation.
The audience was exactly the mix we hoped to serve: postgraduate and doctoral students, early-career and senior academics, clinical pharmacists and healthcare professionals, and colleagues from industry and regulatory authorities. Pharmacometrics sits at the intersection of all of these communities, and it was encouraging to see them in one virtual room.
What Our Participants Said
“The course provided an incredibly clear and logical breakdown of complex mathematical and biological concepts… it gave me a much deeper fundamental understanding of how PK, PD, and modeling interface with one another.”
“Onsite training under the supervision of professional instructors who have real industry experience maximized the benefit and gave us the chance for valuable networking.”
A course like this runs on the generosity of its instructors and organisers. Our sincere thanks to the online teaching team: Aya Ismail, Ibrahim Komeil, Nada El Hoffy, Nouran Omar and Abdelrahman Saqr, and to the onsite instructors, Amira Ghoneim and Hossam Kadry, who guided participants through the hands-on R and nlmixr2 sessions.
We are grateful to the Faculty of Pharmacy at Future University in Egypt for hosting the programme and for their partnership throughout and to our sponsors DAF and collaborators for making participation possible for so many.
The Egypt Chapter is just getting started. If you would like to be part of what comes next, whether as a participant, contributor or partner, we would love to hear from you.