Pharmacokinetics (PK) is defined as the movement of the drug throughout the body, i.e. what the body does to the drug. It looks at the absorption, distribution, metabolism and elimination of the drug within the human body.

PK studies enable drug developers to interpret the relationship of dose (or effect of other covariates e.g. blood pressure, heart rate etc.) to blood or plasma concentrations of drugs in various patient populations. Furthermore, PK studies help determine the need for dose adjustment based on PK differences among demographic subgroups or subgroups with impaired elimination. PK studies also provide the basis for therapeutic drug monitoring in rare patient populations, in the treatment of certain cancers (e.g. methotrexate) or when effective drugs with very narrow safe therapeutic windows must be used.

PK integrates with both Statistics and Programming or can be used as a stand-alone service, where the client already has Statistics and Programming support.

PK works with Bioanalysis labs (labs that quantify the concentrations of drugs from clinical trials) and, on receipt of Bioanalytical data, (Excel or SAS format) can run these through PK software (Phoenix WinNonlin) to calculate PK parameters. The PK Team can work alongside Statistics and Programming at other companies (if they have this capability) or can work alongside our own Statistics and Programming department if needed (not always needed if quick interim analyses, ad-hoc analyses).