Translational learning from clinical studies predicts drug pharmacokinetics across patient populations

• Main Authors: Markus Krauss, Ute Hofmann, Clemens Schafmayer, Svitlana Igel, Jan Schlender, Christian Mueller, Mario Brosch, Witigo von Schoenfels, Wiebke Erhart, Andreas Schuppert, Michael Block, Elke Schaeffeler, Gabriele Boehmer, Linus Goerlitz, Jan Hoecker, Joerg Lippert, Reinhold Kerb, Jochen Hampe, Lars Kuepfer, Matthias Schwab
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Nature Publishing Group 2017-03-01
• Series: npj Systems Biology and Applications
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41540-017-0012-5

Systems pharmacology: predicting population pharmacokinetics in silico Physiologically based modeling together with Bayesian statistics allows the prediction of drug pharmacokinetics in specific patient populations. An interdisciplinary group of clinicians and computational scientists led by Dr. Lars Kuepfer from Bayer developed a generic workflow consisting of several consecutive learning steps where knowledge about both individual physiology as well as drug physicochemistry can be efficiently derived from plasma concentration profiles. The acquired information is then be used for the prediction of the pharmacokinetic behavior of a new drug candidate in a diseased population. This allows to simulate the variability in drug exposure virtually before starting clinical investigation in real patients in order to evaluate drug safety or efficacy through the simulation of virtual populations. Further development of this workflow could improve the safety of clinical development programs to assess the risk-benefit ratio of novel drug candidates in silico.