Dose Administration

When modelling the passage of drug through the body (and possibly the effect it has on the body), we first need to model how the drug is administered into the body.

The simplest case would be a bolus dose in which a single amount of drug is administered instantaneously to a given compartment, such as intravenously into the blood stream (e.g. an injection) or via absorption into a ‘depot’ compartment (e.g. an orally administered pill).

There are, of course, other means of administering a drug and here we will introduce the dosing functions supported by PoPy. All of the dosing functions have two arguments in common:

• the amt argument is the quantity of drug administered in total.

• the lag argument defines a delay between the drug being administered (as specified in the data file) and the drug entering the compartment where it is administered. This can be useful when very little drug is absorbed immediately. Unless otherwise stated, it is assumed that the lag time is zero.

The remaining arguments to the dosing function are dependent on the dose type.

• Bolus Dose
• Infusion
• Gamma Dose
• Weibull Dose