Zachary L Taylor, PhD, MS

I'm an assistant professor in the Division of Translational and Clinical Pharmacology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. My work focuses on developing and implementing personalized drug dosing strategies for pediatric patients. The scope of my research includes understanding and applying pharmacokinetic (PK), pharmacodynamic (PD), pharmacometric (PMx) and pharmacogenetic (PGx) approaches to develop and implement model-informed precision dosing (MIPD).

Through my research, I seek to describe a drug's metabolism and response through quantitative methods, creating translational tools that enable optimized drug dosing strategies and improve therapeutic outcomes for pediatric patients.

Since joining Cincinnati Children's as a doctoral student in 2017, I've been involved in ongoing research to optimize the use of high-dose methotrexate for the treatment of childhood cancers. In December 2019, my doctoral work led to the development of the MTXPK.org web tool that provides users with real-time feedback on an individual patient's pharmacokinetics and facilitates model-informed supportive care. The tool is used by hundreds of clinicians monthly and has been accessed in more than 100 countries. As a team, we continue to study the metabolism of methotrexate in the neonate, infant and obese populations to link the results to a methotrexate-induced side effects tool inside the MTXPK.org platform.

In addition to my clinical research, I'm a senior consultant of the Clinical Pharmacology PK Consultation Service. In that role, I support clinicians with real-time MIPD of therapeutic agents at the bedside. As a member of the Cincinnati Pharmacometrics Center of Excellence program, I provide clinical pharmacology consulting and pharmacometrics services to help pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies determine optimal clinical trial design and pharmacometrics analysis as part of their initial Pediatric Study Plans (iPSP) for FDA submission.

Exposure to clinical pharmacology led to my current research interests. During my master's program, I completed a rotation in the Division of Translational and Clinical Pharmacology at Cincinnati Children's. During that time, I became aware of the translational power and applicability of quantitative methods to describe drug metabolism and response. While pursuing my doctoral training, I gained hands-on experience describing the pharmacokinetics of high-dose methotrexate in pediatric patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. I continued to receive training in clinical pharmacology as a post-doctoral T32 Pediatric Clinical and Developmental Pharmacology research fellow and later as a summer ORISE Fellow in the Division of Translational and Precision Medicine in the Office of Clinical Pharmacology at the FDA. Through these experiences, I gained an understanding of the impact quantitative approaches to drug metabolism have on regulatory submissions to the FDA.

I'm honored to be the recipient of a 2023 trainee grant from the American Society of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics. Previously I was awarded the 2021 Presidential Trainee Award from the American Society of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, the 2020 Presidential Abstract Award from the Pharmacogenomics Global Research Network, and the 2020 Special Interest Group Trainee Abstract Award in Clinical Pharmacometrics from the American Conference of Pharmacometrics.