Advanced Methods of Pharmacokinetic and Pharmacodynamic Systems Analysis

Book excerpt: This volume records the proceedings of the Workshop on Advanced Meth ods of Pharmacokinetic and Pharmacodynamic Systems Analysis, organized by the Biomedical Simulations Resource in May 1990. The meeting brought together over 120 investigators from a number of disciplines, including clinical pharmacology, clinical pharmacy, pharmaceutical science, biomathematics, statistics and biomed ical engineering with the purpose of providing a high-level forum to facilitate the exchange of ideas between basic and clinical research scientists, experimentalists and modelers working on problems in pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. It has been my experience that in many areas of biomedical research, when a meeting of this type is held, the general attitude of those experimentalists willing to attend is one of extreme skepticism: as a group they feel that mathematical modeling has little to offer them in furthering their understanding of the particular biological processes they are studying. This is certainly not the prevailing view when the topic is pharmacokinetics and drug response. Quite the contrary, the use of mathemati cal modeling and associated data analysis and computational methods has been a central feature of pharmacokinetics almost from its beginnings. In fact, the field has borrowed techniques of modeling from other disciplines including applied math ematics, statistics and engineering, in an effort to better describe and understand the processes of drug disposition and drug response.