Personalized pharmacotherapy

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The use of psychotropic drugs in the treatment of psychiatric diseases, e.g. in the treatment of major depression, is recommended in guidelines, but in around 2/3 of the patients the initial antidepressant treatment does not lead to remission and some patients cannot be treated satisfactorily with medication even after several different therapy options.

Research area

One strategy to make pharmacological therapy more effective is so-called precision medicine, the personalized therapy tailored to a patient. Without such an approach, around 1/3 of patients are inadequately treated and become chronic, while for another third of the patients several attempts are needed to find an effective antidepressant, which in turn costs valuable time. Despite existing precision medicine approaches, treatment with psychotropic drugs is still not individualized enough.

For this reason, the research group mainly focuses on the personalized pharmacological treatment of mental disorders. Therefore, pharmacokinetics (therapeutic drug monitoring) as well as pharmaco(epi)genetics (PGx) are used to individualize psychopharmacotherapy. Moreover, we focus on implementation of personalized pharmacotherapy into the clinic.

Team

Head

• PD Dr. rer. nat. Maike Scherf-Clavel 
  Telefon: +49 931 201-76317
  E-Mail: Scherf_M@ ukw.de

Doctoral students

• Cand. Med. Georgios Zioris
• Cand. Med. Meike Kohler

Publications

Publikationen der Arbeitsgruppe finden Sie auf pubmed oder im Publikationsverzeichnis der Klinik.