Re: NONMEM

From: "Andrew Hooker" andrew.hooker@farmbio.uu.se Subject: Re: [NMusers] NONMEM Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2006 18:28:51 +0200 Hi Mark, I agree with most of your assessment about the current state of optimal design. The designs are generally based on getting the best possible parameter estimates of your model and it important to develop methods for looking at other test statistics. Two points: 1. In PopED (www.rfpk.washington.edu ) we have to ability to optimize over the number of samples per individual in a study, the number of individuals in a study, and other design variables other than sample times. See: M. Foracchia, A. Hooker, P. Vicini and A. Ruggeri. PopED, a software for optimal experimental design in population kinetics. Comput Methods Programs Biomed, 74: 29-46, 2004. 2. To me it is not so surprising that the optimal design that you attempted using NCA resulted in sample times similar to the designs people come up with normally (without any fancy optimal design) for these studies, because most people design their studies based on NCA type thought processes anyway. The question that comes to mind is: why shouldn't we use the information we gain from population mixed effect models in our design calculations? It would be interesting to compare the performance of your NCA based design and the D-optimal design you calculated. -Andy Andrew Hooker, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Pharmacometrics Div. of Pharmacokinetics and Drug Therapy Dept. of Pharmaceutical Biosciences Uppsala University Box 591 751 24 Uppsala Sweden Tel: +46 18 471 4355 www.farmbio.uu.se/research.php?avd=5