I read with interest the article by Rizk et al. 1 describing a recent ASCPT Summit on The Future of Translational Clinical Pharmacology. However, I was disappointed that this group decided it was too difficult to define who is or is not a clinical pharmacologist but instead fell back on explaining the discipline by describing what we do. This is not sufficient. To reach agreement on the future of our discipline and define the roadmap to get there, it is essential to have a clear description of clinical pharmacology based on its goal or purpose rather than on its activities. Activities are the means to achieve a goal but not the goal in themselves.
So, what is the purpose of clinical pharmacologists? What do patients and others need from us? Rizk et al. shed light on this in the section “Strengthening the Foundation” where they say that clinical pharmacology principles are based on an understanding of dose response and the influencing factors that lead to variability in drug response. I suggest it is a small step to rephrase this as a description of the purpose of clinical pharmacology:
Clinical pharmacologists study how medicines affect the body and how the body affects medicines. In particular, we investigate why different patients respond differently to the same medicine and determine how this can be avoided or overcome.
Even more simply—we seek the right medicine at the right dose for each patient.
Emerging technologies including data science, novel biomarkers, modeling, and AI provide clinical pharmacologists with a huge opportunity to start understanding and managing response variability at the individual level, 2 , 3 moving beyond the population‐based approaches that have dominated for many years and moving beyond a focus on pharmacokinetics to better consider all the other aspects of response variability. 4 This is a wonderful opportunity, and the future for clinical pharmacology can be very bright indeed.
A final point, I have deliberately not used the term “translational.” A new name will bring confusion and lack of clarity. Is translational clinical pharmacology the same as or different from non‐translational clinical pharmacology, whatever that might be? We have always been translational in our thinking, and I believe we should be proud of our existing discipline name, included in the name of this journal and its owning society. What's needed now is to communicate more effectively what it means.
FUNDING
No funding was received for this work.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
The author declared no competing interests for this work.
References
- 1. Rizk, M.L. et al. The future of clinical translational pharmacology. Clin. Pharmacol. Ther. 120, 36–42 (2026). [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- 2. Wu, C. et al. MRI‐based digital twins to improve treatment response of breast cancer by optimizing neoadjuvant chemotherapy regimens. npj Digit. Med. 8, 195 (2025). [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- 3. Nambiar, M. et al. A drug mix and dose decision algorithm for individualized type 2 diabetes management. npj Digit. Med. 7, 254 (2024). [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- 4. Polasek, T. & Peck, R.W. Beyond population‐level targets for drug concentrations: precision dosing needs individual‐level targets that include superior biomarkers of drug responses. Clin. Pharmacol. Ther. 116, 602–612 (2024). [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]