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Roos van Westrhenen

King's College London, Maastricht University, Parnassia Psychiatric Institute

ORCID iD 0000-0003-2298-9924
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About

Van Westrhenen is a medical doctor who obtained her PhD in basic science in 2005, and afterwards specialized as a psychiatrist and clinical pharmacologist. With this background and also hands-on lab experience with DNA quantitation (rt-PCRs) and clinical experience with pharmacogenetics in oncology during her clinical pharmacology training, she started to apply pharmacogenetics in psychiatry since 2013. She is a highly driven, targeted, energetic clinician and researcher who has dedicated her professional career to innovating (psychopharmacological) treatment for psychiatric patients and is a networker pur sang that is able to unite medical professionals, scientists and patients as is proven below.

Outpatient Clinic: van Westrhenen set-up an innovative outpatient clinic pharmacogenetics in psychiatry, first as a pilot with internal funding in 2017 at Erasmus MC, and successfully transported this outpatient clinic to Parnassia/PsyQ in Amsterdam. Parnassia group is the largest psychiatric institution in The Netherlands, with over 500 locations in the country that treated over 180.000 patients in 2017. The outpatient pharmacogenetics clinic has been fully digitized by van Westrhenen since the outbreak of COVID and patients are seen from all over the country with video calling. She has seen over 350 patients at this clinic where she supplies personalised medication advise based partly on pharmacogenetics. Most patients report benefit from this personalized medication advise in terms of more decrease in psychiatric symptoms and also more incentive of the patient to take the prescribed medication. They often state that they would have liked to have received the consultation earlier in their treatment process as it could have saved them years of -trial-and-error medication trials and likely saved suffering and costs.

Guideline: To assess already available clinical scientific evidence van Westrhenen initiated the drawing up of a national guideline on Implementation of Pharmacogenetics in Psychiatry that was authorized September 2020 by the Dutch Association of Psychiatrists. This guideline was funded by the KNMG (Stichting Kwaliteitsgelden Medisch Specialisten) Van Westrhenen is the chairperson of the NvvP working group, and the guideline was recently published in English in Frontiers in Pharmacology, to ensure international spread (Policy and practice review: A First guideline on the use of pharmacogenetics in clinical psychiatry. R. van Westrhenen ea. Frontiers in Pharmacology, 2021).

Research: van Westrhenen set-up an international consortium and initiated and leads the Horizon2020 funded PSY-PGx project (EUR 8 million) which will perform the largest multicentre, non-industry sponsored RCT ever in psychiatry investigating personalized medication prescription in psychiatric patients world-wide. This study is expected to lead to more targeted pharmacological treatments for psychiatric patients using pharmacogenetics to fine-tune medication prescription by using AI. In the first year the UK and Finnish biobank data will be used to set-up an algorithm for personalized medication prescription, that will later be enriched with the data from the clinical study. Van Westrhenen is the PI (Scientific Coordinator) of this investigator-initiated project and supervises the 8 WPs that will be executed by 16 partners in EU (related) countries and US. The institute from which van Westrhenen coordinates this study will likely become the national and international authority on pharmacogenomics and AI in psychiatry.

Employment

  • King's College London Visiting Senior Vice Lecturer
    2021 - Present
  • Maastricht University PI PSY-PGx Project
    2021 - Present
  • Parnassia Psychiatric Institute PI/Head
    2019 - Present
  • Erasmus Medical Center
    2013 - 2019

Education

Education history is unavailable.

Projects & Funding

Projects & funding information is unavailable.

Publications (78)