“I’m not just creating a model, I’m trying to save lives”

Jurgen Langenhorst has a LinkedIn profile picture where he is standing on top of a snow covered mountain. He loves the mountains, although he admits that it’s a bit weird as he lives in the Netherlands which consists mostly of flat low lying plains. He explains that the picture was taken some years ago in Nepal. He and his wife traveled there to to hike the Three Passes Trek in the Everest region at over 5000 meters above sea level. 

“I always wanted to go to Nepal at least once and my wife agreed that it was a nice place to go. Through some acquaintances, we found this guy who primarily did expeditions to the peaks of Mount Everest. He lived in Nepal but he was Dutch and he arranged everything for us with a guide and a porter.”

Given Jurgen’s career path, it is easy to understand that he has been successful climbing the mountains of his career as well. After his Ph.D. in PKPD modeling in the hematopoietic cell transplantation setting at the University Medical Centre Utrecht, he started in January 2019 as an associate consultant at Pharmetheus. Only four years later, in January 2023, he became a senior consultant, and in 2024, heading a team of MIDD consultants.

The relatively fast promotions came partly because he and some other colleagues joined the company at just the right time. Pharmetheus was small enough to get to know and work alongside the most senior staff. The company was at the same big enough to have good support systems in place meaning they didn’t have to spend time creating new processes and structures. 

Jurgen’s guiding principle at Pharmetheus has been to think about how his efforts at work help others, and to keep in mind that there are people behind the clinical data he works with. 

Jurgen recalls that during his Ph.D. studies when working with allogeneic cell transplantation. He had to go through the clinical status of all the patients that died following a high risk/high reward treatment for leukemia which couldn’t be cured by standard treatments. He had to find the cause of death where it had not been properly documented. He explains that he found that the risk was equally as high of dying from the treatment as from the disease itself.

“With my previous experience of going through the last few paragraphs of patients’ lives, some only children, and what doctors had written about them, I realized that at Pharmetheus, I’m not only creating a model, I’m trying to save lives. I can make sure people get the right doses, for example, and try to make their disease go away with minimal burden to them.”

A LinkedIn post a while back, where Jurgen Langenhorst was mentioned, is about a scientific paper he co-authored with Elodie Plan, one of the founders of Pharmetheus. Their publication describes a new disease model that helps assess the placebo effect and predict remission status of patients with ulcerative colitis and was very useful for the clinical development program of their client. 

“I am still quite proud of this publication as it represents an achievement thanks to our collaboration with experts from Uppsala University. We integrated their knowledge into a new model that allowed us to address the client’s question in a way that was previously unexplored. The client had been relying on less powerful analysis techniques.”

When asked about the next step in his career, Jurgen says he is very happy about where he is right now. He likes the work life balance at Pharmetheus and his highly educated colleagues that help him progress in his career.

“There are just so many smart people around, and it’s in this kind of environment I excel,” he concludes.

Read more about the maximal usage of information from the modified Mayo clinic score by applying a novel modeling method in the paper by Dr. Jurgen Langenhorst and Dr. Elodie Plan.