PopED lite: an optimal design software for preclinical pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic studies

TL;DR

PopED lite is a user-friendly, fast, and accessible software tool designed to facilitate optimal experimental design in preclinical pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic studies, promoting its adoption in drug discovery.

Contribution

It introduces a simplified, rapid, and intuitive software tool that makes optimal design methods accessible for preclinical drug discovery researchers.

Findings

Demonstrated through three real-world case studies.

Enables interactive and efficient experimental design.

Bridges the gap between complex theory and practical application.

Abstract

Optimal experimental design approaches are seldom used in pre-clinical drug discovery. Main reasons for this lack of use are that available software tools require relatively high insight in optimal design theory, and that the design-execution cycle of in vivo experiments is short, making time-consuming optimizations infeasible. We present the publicly available software PopED lite in order to increase the use of optimal design in pre-clinical drug discovery. PopED lite is designed to be simple, fast and intuitive. Simple, to give many users access to basic optimal design calculations. Fast, to fit the short design-execution cycle and allow interactive experimental design (test one design, discuss proposed design, test another design, etc). Intuitive, so that the input to and output from the software can easily be understood by users without knowledge of the theory of optimal design. In this way, PopED lite is highly useful in practice and complements existing tools. Key functionality of PopED lite is demonstrated by three case studies from real drug discovery projects.