Pieter De Cock - Chair
Tags: Pharmaceutical care, Rational Drug Use , Pharmacometrics, Clinical Drug Research, Biomarker research, Steering Committee
Affiliations
- Ghent University, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Department of Basic and Applied Medical Sciences, Ghent Precision Dosing Unit
- Ghent University Hospital, Department of Pharmacy
Research focus
Pieter De Cock is a hospital pharmacist and clinical pharmacologist at Ghent University Hospital. Since 2023, he has served as an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Ghent University. Here he heads the Ghent Precision Dosing Unit within the Department of Basic and Applied Medical Sciences and coordinates the interfaculty Centre of Expertise in Clinical Pharmacology and Pharmacotherapy.
During drug development, pharmaceutical companies primarily focus on the “average patient” when deriving drug dosing regimens, which often insufficiently reflects the complexity and variability encountered in real-life clinical practice. Consequently, clinicians are frequently challenged to individualize dosing in patients with dynamic physiology, comorbidities, and polypharmacy. In response, the Ghent Precision Dosing Unit focuses on applied pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) research that integrates pharmacometric modelling and simulation, Bayesian forecasting, and therapeutic drug monitoring to develop evidence-based, tailored dosing regimens that are directly applicable in routine clinical care. This research is embedded in daily hospital practice and conducted in close collaboration with the hospital pharmacy and clinical departments at Ghent University Hospital, ensuring continuous translation into hands-on, individualized dosing advice at the bedside.
Clinical pharmacology spans multiple subdisciplines, each vital to ensuring medicines are used safely, effectively, and responsibly. By centralising the expertise of UGent and UZ Gent under the Ghent Centre-of-Expertise for Clinical Pharmacology and Pharmacotherapy, we are creating a knowledge hub where science meets practice, where evidence informs prescribing, where precision medicine becomes reality, where patient safety is a guiding principle, and where future talent is nurtured to lead the next generation of optimized medication use.- Pieter De Cock, hospital pharmacist-clinical pharmacologist
"While empiric dosing assumes patients conform to the mean, model-informed dosing recognises variability as biology’s rule— transforming population averages into individualized patient care. Through interdisciplinary collaboration within the Ghent Centre-of-Expertise for Clinical Pharmacology and Pharmacotherapy, we are able to bring precision dosing from theory to bedside practice."- Pieter De Cock, hospital pharmacist-clinical pharmacologist