Current Research and Scholarly Interests
My ongoing Stanford research activities involve studies on the clinical pharmacology of drugs used in HIV-infected patients.
A focus of my laboratory's efforts in investigating drugs used in HIV-infected patients is to optimize the individual benefit/risk of pharmacotherapy of HIV or opportunistic infections by discovering and quantifying the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics (PK/PD) of drugs used in such therapy; i.e., the distribution of individual-specific dose-concentration-effect relationships in the population. My laboratory has a special interest in understanding the relationships between antiviral drug exposure and virologic and toxicological responses. In the past this has lead to studies examining drug-taking behavior in these patients, since exposure is a function of both individual variability in pharmacokinetics and individual patterns of drug-taking behavior.
At the present time, my interests in HIV are in the access and quality of antiretroviral drugs for patients from less developed countries. The use of substandard drugs carries a high risk of promoting drug resistant variants of HIV, which could have widespread consequences over the long term. Another interest is drug-drug interactions between antiretroviral drugs and drugs used to treat opportunistic infections, in particular drugs used to treat tuberculosis.
