PumasAI, a science-first organization that turns data into life-saving decisions faster, announced its partnership with SOPHAS (Society of Pharmacometrics and Health Analytics) to launch a new course aimed at empowering the next generation of scientists and healthcare professionals with practical knowledge on Artificial Intelligence in Drug Development (AIDD). This will be the first of many such courses being offered through this partnership.

This course is open to a global audience, no matter their location, and it runs from October 2025 through May 2026. It is designed to equip the next generation of global scientists, public health professionals, and data-driven thinkers with the tools and knowledge to apply AI meaningfully in the drug development lifecycle.

Learning will take place across three immersive phases:

• Phase 1, Structured Virtual Learning (Oct 2025 – Feb 2026): Participants will build a strong foundational understanding through self-paced modules, recorded lectures, guided exercises, and access to Pumas software tools.
• Phase 2, Project-Based Learning (Mar 2026): A 10-day virtual workshop will bring learners together for an intensive hands-on training with advanced pharmacometric modeling and scientific machine learning tools, Pumas® and DeepPumas™. These expert-led sessions will feature real-world case studies in drug development and culminate in a capstone project, allowing participants to apply their acquired knowledge and skills to a practical challenge. 
• Phase 3, Final Submission and Certification (May 2026): Participants will complete the program by submitting their final projects and receiving a Certificate of Attendance or Certificate of Completion, recognizing their readiness to apply AI in professional drug development environments.

“This program is built to democratize access to advanced modeling and AI tools,” said Dr. Vijay Ivaturi, Co-founder and CEO of PumasAI. “Too often, the use of machine learning in drug development is reserved for specialists with expensive tools and siloed training. We’re changing that. Through this collaboration with SOPHAS, we are opening the door for more students, researchers, and professionals around the world to gain meaningful, hands-on AI experience.”

Those that attend will: 

• Understand the fundamental concepts of machine learning and their applications in drug development use cases.
• Understand and apply machine learning techniques for covariate modeling and prognostic factor identification.
• Understand and use explainable machine learning techniques to address drug development questions.
• Combine scientific knowledge and neural networks to build scientific machine learning (SciML) pharmacodynamic models.
• Understand the conditional variational autoencoder generative machine learning model and its relationship to nonlinear mixed-effects models.
• Compare pure machine learning, traditional scientific modeling, and hybrid SciML approaches when analyzing longitudinal clinical trial data, with and without random effects.
• Build and use DeepNLME models to analyze disease progression and biomarker data across multiple realistic case studies.

The course will be taught by leading industry experts, including the following (alphabetical order):

• Mohamed Tarek, PhD is Senior Product Engineer at PumasAI and a Research Affiliate at the University of Sydney Business School
• Lucas Pereira is a Product Engineer at PumasAI and holds a master's degree from the Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo
• Vijay Ivaturi, PhD is Co-Founder & CEO at PumasAI and Endowed Chair at the Center for Pharmacometrics, Manipal
• James Lu, PhD is Senior Principal Investigator of the Bioinformatics Institute at A*STAR, Co-Chair of the IQ Consortium AI/ML WG, and Editorial Board Member at CPT: Pharmacometrics & Systems Pharmacology
• Anthony Blaom, PhD, is a scientific computing consultant, mathematician, and Co-Creator of MLJ, an open-source machine learning platform written in Julia, a project launched by the Alan Turing Institute, London

To learn more or enroll in the course, visit: https://sophas.net/courses-ai-in-drug-development

Universities and academic researchers can gain free access to PumasAI tools by emailing [email protected].