Louvina Elizabeth van der Laan

PhD Student 

Louvina is a medical doctor working in paediatric TB/HIV clinical research and, since April 2018, a PhD student in pharmacometrics.

She has a passion in improving treatment for children affected by TB and HIV, which is a critically important yet much neglected area of research. Few clinicians in South Africa have formal training in clinical pharmacology to support this emerging area of clinical research in children, so Louvina has decided to contribute to filling this gap and develop her career in clinical pharmacology research focused on paediatric TB.

Since 2014, she has been working as a clinical investigator at a dedicated pediatric pharmacokinetic research unit based at Brooklyn Chest TB Hospital in Cape Town, which is the main clinical site for the paediatric research group at the Desmond Tutu TB Centre (DTTC) at Stellenbosch University.

She holds a Master’s degree in Clinical Pharmacology at the University of Cape Town (UCT) focusing on HIV and TB, awarded in 2017. For her dissertation, she developed a model with the UCT pharmacometrics group to assess the pharmacokinetics and drug-drug interactions of lopinavir/ritonavir administered with first and second-line antituberculosis drugs in HIV-infected children treated for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis.

She enrolled for her PhD in 2018 with the plan to expand her knowledge and skills in pharmacometric modelling as a particular field of interest. While still dedicated to her clinical work, she is actively involved in the analysis of pharmacokinetic studies through pharmacokinetic modelling using the software Monolix/NONMEM.

Research Projects:

Louvina is part of the research team on the following studies:

  • Test the efficacy of the Human Papilloma Virus vaccine to reduce HIV transmission in women

  • Pharmacokinetic trials of antituberculosis drugs in HIV-infected and uninfected children conducted by DTTC, in collaboration with the University of Cape Town, the Family Clinical Research Unit (FAM-CRU) - Stellenbosch University, the DAIDS Paediatric HIV trials network (IMPAACT), TB ALLIANCE (USA), the National Institute of Health (NIH) and Otsuka Pharmaceutical Development and Commercialization Inc (USA).

Research interests:

PK/PD modelling in paediatrics.

Drug-drug interactions.

Software: NONMEM, Monolix