Travel Grant for Ms. Chiara Maria Hensen

Following a highly competitive selection process, the Society of Medicinal Plants and Natural Product Research has awarded Ms. Chiara Hensen a generous travel grant to attend the society's annual international conference in Naples in September. In addition to a poster presentation, Ms. Hensen has been allocated a lecture slot to present the results of her research on the topic “Rationalizing the dosage of herbal medicinal products for children using PBPK modeling: St. John's Wort as an example.”

The topic explores a previously little-studied area of defining specific dosages of medicines (in this case, herbal medicines) for children. Since clinical studies to determine dosages for drugs in children are very limited for legal and ethical reasons, such preparations are often used in a greatly simplified form by simply “scaling down” adult dosages to children. However, from a pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic point of view, children are not small adults, which can sometimes lead to serious problems.

Ms. Hensen's research using in silico simulations examines the extent to which pediatric dosages for herbal medicines (e.g., St. John's wort preparations) can be determined on the basis of adult data using physiology-based pharmacokinetic modeling (PBPK). Ms. Hensen's dissertation project is a collaboration between IPBP and the group of Clinical Pharmacy (Prof. Dr. G. Hempel)