pharmacokinetics

• define the term pharmacokinetics

  what the body does to the drug
• what are the methods for measuring drug concentration in plasma and other biological samples?

  Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS)

  Immunoassay - ligand binding assay e.g. ELISA
• why is pharmacokinetics important?

  Make sure the drug is safe and is having a biological effect.

  If drug concentration in plasma is too high = toxicity = adverse event

  If drug concentration is too low - no treatment effect
• what are the features of a pharmacokinetic profile?

  MTC - maximum tolerated concentration

  MEC - minimum effective concentration

  Cmax, Tmax and AUD
• what is Cmax?

  maximum concentration of the drug in plasma (also called ‘peak concentration’) 
• what is Tmax?

  time of maximum concentration of drug in plasma (time scale for biological molecules like antibodies usually pan from days to weeks whereas with small molecule its usually hours)
• what is the AUC?

  • area under the curve for the plasma concentration curve
  • total drug exposure across time (overall exposure)
  • used for analysis of pharmacokinetic data
  • commonly measured metric e.g. used to calculate bioavailability (AUCoral vs AUCiv)
• define half-life

  time it takes for the drug concentration in plasma to reduce by half
• half-life is determined by which processes?

  determined by distribution and elimination