The current issue of Biopharmaceutics and Drug Disposition is dedicated to the theme of 'physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) modeling' and its applications in drug developmental and regulatory assessment. The editors deemed it necessary to provide an opening commentary to highlight many of important aspects related to the resurgence of PBPK and to offer suggestions for further improvement in the propagation of this discipline to other areas of modeling. Two guest editors, Drs Shiew-Mei Huang and Bill Smith, who have considerable experience in regulatory and drug development science, have provided their personal views in separate commentaries. These perspectives focus on further requirements to progress the field (including demonstration of validity and added value, educational needs, quality of modeling, best practices and so on). We are grateful to all authors and guest editors who contributed to the special issue and we hope that the readers, particularly those working in industrial settings, find the special issue of interest and practical use for implementing policies on the expanded use of PBPK.
Past and Present Status of PBPK in Drug DevelopmentPhysiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) modeling is an extremely useful approach with the ability to predict the temporal profiles of xenobiotics and their metabolites both in animals and humans exposed to one or several environmental chemicals or drugs. PBPK modeling is not a new subject and there have been numerous publications describing the methodology and its applications. However, not until recently and with few exceptions, these efforts have been largely academic, and in many cases related to environmental toxicology rather than drug development. Many reviews have provided reference to the PBPK methodology. However, the range of applications of PBPK modeling as a tool in drug development and policies in embracing this type of modeling as a link between the preclinical and clinical studies has not been adequately addressed in the past. This issue has assembled a collection of reports to focus on the applications and they cover various practices in industry, with relevance to study design and regulatory assessment.Recent analysis of FDA submissions carried out by Zhao et al. has indicated a sharp increase in the number of applications of PBPK in drug development for both NDA and IND cases [1]. Some have considered the exploitation of PBPK modeling in drug development to be the result of a greater connectivity between classical PBPK and in vitro-in vivo extrapolation (IVIVE) techniques in recent years [2] while others are encouraged by the availability of user-friendly software and increased computing power, providing the ease to foster a much greater enthusiasm towards the more mechanistic models preferred for the regulatory framework to usages of PBPK modeling more frequently than before [3].