Professor Teijo Saari (MD, PhD, University of Turku) is a specialist in anesthesiology and intensive care and cardiac anesthesia at the Turku University Hospital, Turku, Finland. Since 2004, he has been conducting research on clinical pharmacology examining the pain therapeutics and anesthetics and developing pharmacometric models for precise drug dosing. His PhD work evaluated drug-drug interactions between antimycotes and drugs used in anesthesiology and pain medicine (University of Turku, April 2005). In 2011-2013 he worked as post doctoral fellow in University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany in pharmacometric research project: ’PEP’ – Personalized Effect-Controlled Pharmacotherapy. Since 2013, he has lead his research group focusing on acute pain medicine. In January 2017, he was appointed to Tenure Track as Associate Professor and in June 2021 as Full Professor and Chairman of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care at the University of Turku.

His career publications total is 64 (h-index 26) with published highlights including high-ranked papers in Anesthesiology, British Journal of Anesthesiology and Clinical Pharmacokinetics.

Professor Saari's principal research focus has been to provide novel information on therapeutics used in acute pain medicine. Beginning from 2013 he has led a research group with special interest on model-informed precision dosing and development of new dosing modalities for pain therapeutics. Important aspect of his research has been a pursuit  to reduce opioid use with adjuvants added to the opioid therapy in the postoperative setting. His work has demonstrated that pharmacometric models can improve the precision of drug dosing during postoperative phase. Furthermore, his studies have established covariate effects explaining between-patient variability. His future aim is to discover biomarkers that can predict chronic pain development.