Official URL: http://www.springerlink.com/content/n1449m80289255...

A powerful new software concept to physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) modelling of drug disposition is presented. It links the inherent modular understanding in pharmacology with orthogonal design principles from software engineering. This concept allows for flexible and user-friendly design of pharmacokinetic whole body models, data analysis, hypotheses testing or extrapolation. The typical structure of physiologically-based pharmacokinetic models is introduced. The resulting requirements from a modelling and software engineering point of view and its realizations in the software tool MEDICI-PK are described. Finally, an example in the context of drug-drug interaction studies is given, that demonstrates the advantage of defining a whole-body pharmacokinetic model in terms of the underlying physiological processes quite impressively: A system of 162 ODEs is automatically compiled based on the specification of 7 local physiological processes only.