Ubiquity: a framework for physiological/mechanism-based pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic model development and deployment

Practitioners of pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic modeling routinely employ various software packages that enable them to fit differential equation based mechanistic or empirical models to biological/pharmacological data. The availability and choice of different analytical tools, while enabling, can also pose a significant challenge in terms of both, implementation and transferability. A package has been developed that addresses these issues by creating a simple text-based format, which provides methods to reduce coding complexity and enables the modeler to describe the components of the model based on the underlying physiochemical processes. A Perl script builds the system for multiple formats (ADAPT, MATLAB, Berkeley Madonna, etc.), enabling analysis across several software packages and reducing the chance for transcription error. Workflows can then be built around this package, which can increase efficiency and model availability. As a proof of concept, tools are included that allow models constructed in this format to be run with MATLAB both at the scripting level and through a generic graphical application that can be compiled and run as a stand-alone application.