Pharmacokinetic Modelling

Pharmacokinetic modelling is a mathematical method to simulate the uptake and distribution of drugs and toxic substances in an organism. For small molecular weight substances the following physical and chemical properties of a compound must be known:

  1. Molecular weight
  2. Lipid/water partition coefficient
  3. Solubility in lipids and in water, and
  4. Receptor binding constants

Results obtained from experiments with a DustGun® system and isolated perfused lung can then be used to:

  1. predict the rates of absorption and concentration gradients of different solutes in the pulmonary air/blood barrier.
  2. simulate the interaction between the solute and receptor sites, either as a ligand or a metabolism substrate.
  3. simulate the effects of either poor solubility or slow-release kinetics of the absorbing solute on the absorption rates and tissue concentrations.
  4. simulate the influence of pulmonary remodelling on the absorption rates and tissue concentrations. The precision of these predictions can be increased by comparison with results from substances with similar physicochemical properties extracted from our database.