Daria Kovtoune is a French student from the Ecole des Mines d’Albi, an engineering school in Albi, France. Ecole des Mines offers multi-disciplinary studies in engineering sciences. Daria is about to begin her last year degree. Next year hopefully she will get a master’s degree in biology and health engineering.
Daria will work for three months at PSE-Lab for an internship on Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics.
At present, Daria’s main research topic at PSE-Lab concerns the notion of identifiability of systems of ordinary differential equations describing the pharmacokinetics of drugs and the regression of model parameters. The pharmacokinetic model is based on a system of 15 ODEs depending on 33 parameters. A few parameters are unknown and therefore need to be determined. Aim of the research on model identifiability is to understand if the unknown parameters (aka degrees of freedom) are unique for each input condition (individual parameters and drug’s parameters). The numerical identification of the regression parameters is important also for further applications devoted to determine optimal doses of the drug to be administrated to individual patients.
