Building Pharmacometrics Capacity in Africa: Inside the Egypt Chapter’s First Clinical Pharmacology & Pharmacometrics Course
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
