Model perpetrators

Uppsala University researchers have developed a pharmacodynamic model that predicts synergistic and antagonistic effects of multidrug combinations more accurately than existing models, providing drug developers with a new tool to help select candidate drug combinations before animal testing.

Study author Sebastian Wicha told BioCentury the team’s model, dubbed the general pharmacodynamic interaction model (GPDI), uses data from drugs administered as monotherapies to predict how they will interact in combination. Wicha, who was a postdoc at Uppsala when he authored the study, is a professor at the University of Hamburg’s Institute of Pharmacy.

Wicha’s team built GPDI by combining two well-known models: the sigmoidal maximum effect model (sigmoidal E_max model), which predicts the effect of a drug as a function of its concentration and...