We are delighted to announce that Engineering PhD student Elin Boger won the Breakthrough Scientist of the year in the AstraZeneca Science Awards 2015. She was awarded the prize for her work within the field of inhalation pharmacokinetics, which aims to understand the fate of inhaled drugs. Establishing quantitative concentration-effect relationships, commonly referred to as PK/PD-relationships, for inhaled drugs is known to be notoriously difficult as no specific techniques exist. For the first time, Elin has shown a way to adapt receptor occupancy studies to directly measure lung target site distribution vs whole lung pharmacokinetics. Upon analysing the data, Elin then conceived the idea, and went on to develop a novel mechanistic and physiologically-based mathematical model for lung pharmacokinetics. Combined, this work has increased the understanding of PK/PD–relationships of inhaled drugs.

Elin is supervised by Dr Mike Chappell and Dr Neil Evans on the Innovative Modelling for Pharmacological Advances through Collaborative Training (IMPACT) project. Speaking of the honour, she said: "To me the award shows the increasing importance of mechanistic modelling within the pharmaceutical industry, which feels great!"

Many congratulations to Elin on this prestigious achievement.