Mathematical Modelling in Pharmaceutical Development

Health care costs have been rising in Canada, driven in part by the spiralling cost of drug development. The objective of this project is to integrate mathematical modelling into the pharmaceutical development process, from a drug's affinity to its toxicity to the prediction of pharmacokinetics and eventually, to population statistics of the drug's potency. The project team uses an integrated approach to the pre-clinical drug evaluation process with a molecular analysis of the drug's interactions with protein targets as the first element. During the past year, the team focussed on oncology applications of mathematical modelling including chemotherapy drug design and computational testing, radiation therapy optimization, tumour growth models and image analysis, molecular models of cell division and bioinformatics data mining for gene mutations and markers for specific cancers.