Nynke Jager is a hospital pharmacy resident at the Amsterdam University Medical Centre in Amsterdam (AMC), the Netherlands.
During her studies in Groningen, she became interested in pharmacokinetics and clinical pharmacology. In 2010, she started a PhD at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, which resulted in the thesis Bioanalysis and Clinical Pharmacology of Tamoxifen in Breast Cancer(2014). During her PhD, she has developed several HPLC-MS assays and also a dried blood spot assay for the determination of tamoxifen and its active metabolite and she implemented these assay in patient care. Concurrent with her PhD training, she started and completed the training as a Clinical Pharmacologist.
After finishing her PhD, she started working as a hospital pharmacy resident, where she became particularly interested in the pharmacokinetics and clinical pharmacology of antibiotics. She has been a member of the AMS-team, was involved in several teaching programs on this subject and performed a clinical trial on ciprofloxacin dosing in patients with renal impairment. She was also involved in the guidelines for therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) at the AMC, as well as in the daily task of performing TDM with the use of dosing software for patients treated with aminoglycosides and vancomycin.
Nynke’s visit to the University of Queensland under the supervision of Prof. Jason Roberts was inspired by the many papers she has read during her hospital pharmacy residency, and the implications of the research performed at UQCCR for the patient care in the Netherlands. Moreover, she wrote a review together with Prof. Roberts and Prof. Lipman in 2016, which was a very positive and educational experience.
She mainly works on a project on the feasibility of the use of therapeutic drug monitoring in combination with dosing software to achieve PK/PD targets for commonly used beta-lactam antibiotics in treating infections among critically ill patients at the RBWH, together with Dr. Menino Cotta. She is currently looking at the different dosing software tools that are available for beta-lactam dosing, and if there are differences between these software tools, in features as well as in the obtained dose advice. Also, she is using dosing software in daily clinical care at the ICU in collaboration with the clinical pharmacists at the ICU department of the RBWH. Her findings will be used to set up a large clinical trial to investigate the efficiency of dosing software for beta-lactam dose optimization.
During her stay in Brisbane she also nurtured the opportunity to work on a review on tissue penetrations of antibiotics with Prof. Roberts and Prof. Lipman and she is working on a population pharmacokinetic model of flucloxacillin.
After the completion of her hospital pharmacy residency, Nynke hopes to combine working as a hospital pharmacist with continuing collaborative research projects to optimise antimicrobial treatment.
