The right target, dose and regimen are critical to success in drug discovery. Thus, building the best possible understanding of these variables as early as possible in the drug discovery process is highly beneficial.

This presentation disusses the use of pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic modeling techniques to extract parameter estimates from multiple species, and the application of allometric scaling principles to extrapolate human PK parameters and dose for a novel biological. We also discuss the use of a systems pharmacology approach to investigate optimal targets and drug doses in the nerve growth factor pathway.  These examples demonstrate that translational modeling using SimBiology can help focus resources by indicating the target, approaches and doses most likely to succeed.   

About the Presenter: Neil Benson

Neil has 20 years’ experience working in the pharmaceutical industry at SmithKline Beecham, Pfizer and Xenologiq Ltd. He has held a number of senior leadership positions, most recently as Head of systems pharmacology at Pfizer, Sandwich. He was awarded the Pfizer Upjohn award for innovation in developing dose prediction methodology. In 2011, he founded Xenologiq Ltd, a consultancy company interested in reducing PKPD and systems pharmacology approaches to effective practice in drug discovery. He has extensive experience of using modeling and simulation to address questions of critical importance in drug discovery including; clinical dose prediction, optimal target identification and biomarker selection and has authored ~ 30 papers and patents. Educated at the University of East Anglia (UK) and the University of Lund (Sweden), Neil has a First class Honours degree and a PhD in physical biochemistry.