Marie Curie Fellowship for Juan Pablo Rigalli

Juan Pablo received a Marie Curie Fellowship from the European Commission for his study 'Extracellular vesicles as a tool to predict drug clearance and improve precision pharmacotherapy'.

Extracellular vesicles are nanoparticles released by almost every cell of the organism. They are easily accessible, for example in urine and blood, and provide useful information about the cells of origin. In the frame of this project, Juan will investigate the application of extracellular vesicles to estimate the drug clearance capacity of different tissues.

In general, drugs are prescribed based on average parameters from a population. However, individuals may exhibit enormous differences in their drug clearance. This could lead to the lack of therapeutic efficacy or toxicity. For some particular therapeutic agents, life threatening situations may occur due to underdosing or overdosing. Hereby, extracellular vesicles will be investigated as a potential tool to assist the physicians in providing a treatment fitted to each individual patient.

With this Fellowship Juan will return to the Department of Clinical Pharmacology and Pharmacoepidemiology at the Universitätsklinikum ​Heidelberg (UKHD).