Our new expert in clinical and applied biochemistry
Friday 3 May, we celebrated Lasse Bak's appointment as professor. Lasse Bak is employed part-time as Professor of Clinical and Applied Biochemistry in collaboration with the Department of Clinical Biochemistry at Rigshospitalet.
The festive day was held at Rigshospitalet in Glostrup, where our Head of Department Dan Stærk gave a speech for the new professor and Niklas Rye Jørgensen, Professor at UCPH and Chief Physician at Rigshospitalet, gave a speech in connection with the reception.
Professor Lasse Bak gave a very personal inaugural lecture with the title "It's biochemistry, stupid", where he took the audience on a tour through his career – a small journey where he emphasized how important it is as a researcher to keep your eye on the ball and seek the truth, even though you may end up focusing more on "selling" a certain point of view on a scientific problem.
In his lecture, Lasse Bak also touched on his strategy for the professorship. He is working with Associate Professor Trine M. Lund's group to utilize TDM data, therapeutic drug monitoring data, i.e. measurements of the concentration of drug substances in the blood of patients in order to build better PK/PD models (PK stands for pharmacokinetics and PD for pharmacodynamics). Trine Lund's group has the expertise to build the models, where Lasse Bak and his group can provide data and use the models to do "model-based dosing", i.e. use the models to predict the right dose for a patient, based on e.g. gender, age, BMI, other medications and genetics, etc.
During the lecture, Lasse also touched on whether nerve cells use glucose or lactate during activation, a topic that is important for understanding where FDG-PET signals are formed by PET scans. FDG, Fluoro-Deoxy-Glucose, is a tracer used in PET scans to diagnose or assess the effect of chemotherapy because it is very easily absorbed into cancer cells that have an increased metabolism.