Industry Jargon Explained… Pharmacokinetics
Pharmacokinetics is really just the study of the time course of drug liberation, absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion.
LADME
Liberation – the process of release of a drug from the pharmaceutical formulation – ie Pro Drug to active Hormone, eg Esterised Testosterone, are there active metabolites ? etc
Absorption – the process of a substance entering the blood circulation.
Distribution – the dispersion or dissemination of substances throughout the fluids and tissues of the body.
Metabolism (or biotransformation, or inactivation) – the recognition by the organism that a foreign substance is present and the irreversible transformation of parent compounds into daughter metabolites.
Excretion – the removal of substances from the body. In rare cases, some drugs irreversibly accumulate in body tissue.
Clinical pharmacokinetics is the application of pharmacokinetic principles to the safe and effective therapeutic management of drugs in an individual patient.
You don’t need to use the language if you understand the principles, sure..
So how important are the principals?
Well, inappropriate Pharmacokinetics in Man is the number one reason for the failure of New Chemical Entities, up to 40 percent.
That and a lack of clinical efficacy (29.3 percent ) accounts for about 70 percent of all New Drug Candidate Failures.
IMO this is far, far more important if you are going to be messing around with drugs that have been abandoned by developers.. ie Research Chemicals rather than run of the mill garden variety AAS where these things are well understood already.
Victor Black
