REU 2007 – Quantifying Uncertainty in Predictions of Hepatic Clearance

In the process of drug development, it is important to understand the pharmacokinetics of candidate compounds. Among the pharmacokinetic parameters of interest is hepatic clearance, which is the rate at which blood is cleared of the drug by the liver. Generally, point estimates for hepatic clearance are obtained from preclinical data and used in clinical models without accounting for the uncertainty in these estimates. The goal of this project is to construct a Bayesian model for hepatic clearance which can be used to quantify the uncertainty in terms of a posterior distribution and evaluate the sensitivity of the distribution to various model assumptions.