Personalised Medicine and Targeted Therapies
Graduate School of Health and Medical Sciences at University of Copenhagen
This is a specialised course. This means that 80% of the seats are reserved to PhD students enrolled at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences at UCPH and 20% of the seats are reserved to PhD students from other Danish Universities/faculties (except CBS).
The course is free of charge for PhD students at Danish universities (except Copenhagen Business School), and for PhD Students from NorDoc member faculties. All other participants must pay the course fee.
Anyone can apply for the course, but if you are not a PhD student at a Danish university, you will be placed on the waiting list until enrollment deadline. This also applies to PhD students from NorDoc member faculties. After the enrollment deadline, available seats will be allocated to applicants on the waiting list.
Learning objectives
A student who has met the objectives of the course will be able to:
1. Knowledge: Understand the conceptual principles underlying personalised medicine. Define and explain the core concepts of personalised medicine and targeted therapies, including “omics”, biomarkers, and molecular pathology approaches
2. Knowledge: Have insight into basic genomic testing concepts and terminology, as well as next-generation sequencing
3. Knowledge: Understand the principles of GCP, the legal and regulatory framework for clinical trials with medicinal products, and the roles of investigators, and regulatory authorities.
4. Skills: Able to critically assess the feasibility and challenges of running a clinical trial in personalised medicine contexts, including patient recruitment, biomarker assays, and data integration
5. Skills: Able to compare pharmacogenetic tests and assess clinical utility
6. Skills: Have methodological insight on how to best identify known heterogeneity within a disease or population and use this information to guide clinical management
7. Skills: Assess the spectrum, prevalance, and impact of mutation(s) on protein function
8. Competences: To put personalised medicine into a larger societal context complementing scientific considerations with economical, legal, and ethical perspectives
9. Competences: Ability to communicate effectively with multidisciplinary teams (clinicians, researchers, regulators, industry) in the context of precision medicine research
10. Competences: Insight into pharmacogenomics and theorise from these data a suitable therapeutic and computational drug discovery approach
11. Competences: Document GCP qualifications and contribute professionally to the conduct, monitoring, and quality assurance of clinical trials
12. Competences: Ability to leverage driver mutations and companion diagnostics in therapy development and management
Content
Personalised medicine (PerMed) is a cross-cutting field that draws on expertise and data from very different disciplines and sectors. PerMed is defined in the European Council Conclusion on personalised medicine for patients (2015/C 421/03) as: “[…] it is widely understood that personalised medicine refers to a medical model using characterisation of individuals’ phenotypes and genotypes (e.g. molecular profiling, medical imaging, lifestyle data) for tailoring the right therapeutic strategy for the right person at the right time, and/or to determine the predisposition to disease and/or to deliver timely and targeted prevention.”
Personalised Medicine requires a specific set of knowledge and skills including insight into genomic analysis, rational drug design and their implementation for tailored medical treatments. This course integrates personalised medicine and targeted therapies with clinical trial methodology, with a particular focus on therapy development. The course combines pharmacological understanding with practical competencies in drug development, and clinical research design, addressing a growing need for professionals capable of bridging experimental pharmaceutical sciences and clinical application. Students will gain insight into the full translational pathway from biomarker discovery and stratified therapies to the design, implementation, and regulation of clinical trials.
The course will have the following teaching modules:
- Foundations and concepts of personalised medicine (biomarkers, genomics, targeted therapies)
- Translational pathway from discovery to clinical application
- Clinical trial design (RCTs, adaptive, basket and umbrella trials)
- Good Clinical Practice (GCP) and regulatory frameworks
- Implementation and real-world challenges
The course is structured in lectures, guided discussions, and related specific practical exercises, and will cover the following topics:
• Genetic variation & genetic disease: Concepts of pathological variations and clinical implications.
• Pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics: Adapting genetic knowledge to personalised diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment
• PerMed in the context of drug discovery, clinical development, production & manufacturing
• Personalizing computational structural drug discovery
• Systems pharmacology and pharmacometrics to understand variability in drug response
• Targeted therapeutics, companion diagnostics, and advanced genome therapeutics
• RCTs and clinical trials in PerMed
• Pharmacovigilance: Register-based data for personalised and stratified medicine
• Cancer biology & cancer genetics
• Omics methods to enable the selection of optimal screening strategies, interventions or therapies
• Legal & ethical issues of PerMed
• Health economical aspects including reimbursement and market access
Common lunch and coffee/refreshments during breaks are included.
Participants
PhD students across multiple fields across biomedical sciences with an interest in personalised medicine, and wishing to understand not only the biology of targeted therapies, but also the clinical and regulatory pathway from idea to approved study. Basic knowledge of molecular biology is an advantage but not mandatory.
Relevance to graduate programmes
The course is relevant to PhD students from the following graduate programmes at the Graduate School of Health and Medical Sciences, UCPH:
Pharmaceutical Sciences (Drug Research Academy)
All graduate programmes
Language
English
Form
The course consists of lectures, group work, and workshops, presentations and discussions.
Course director
José Moreira, Professor, Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology, jomo@sund.ku.dk
Alexander S. Hauser, Associate Professor, Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology, alexander.hauser@sund.ku.dk
Teachers
José Moreira, Professor, Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology
Alexander S. Hauser, Associate Professor, Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology
Volker Lauschke, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden
Alberto Santos, Head Data Science Platform, DTU Biosustain
Anders Hviid, Professor Statens Serum Institut
Kristoffer Rohrberg, Head of the Phase 1 Unit at Rigshospitalet
Marianne Andersen - Novo Nordisk A/S
Tore B. Stage, University of Southern Denmark
Katharina Ó Cathaoir - Associate Professor - Faculty of Law
Jukka Rantanen, Professor, Department of Pharmacy
Albert Jelke Kooistra, Associate Professor, Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology
Maurizio Sessa, Associate Professor, Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology
Charlotte Vermehren, Associate Professor, Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology
Dates
1-8 March 2027
Course location
PharmaSchool, University of Copenhagen, Universitetsparken 2 or Jagtvej 160, 2100 Copenhagen
Registration
Please register before 1 February 2027
Expected frequency
Once a year
Seats to PhD students from other Danish universities will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis and according to the applicable rules. Applications from other participants will be considered after the last day of enrolment.