Pharmacokinetic/Pharmacodynamic Modeling and Application in Antibacterial and Antifungal Pharmacotherapy: A Narrative Review

Abstract

Pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics are areas in pharmacology related to different themes in the pharmaceutical sciences, including therapeutic drug monitoring and different stages of drug development. Although the knowledge of these disciplines is essential, they have historically been treated separately. While pharmacokinetics was limited to describing the time course of plasma concentrations after administering a drug-dose, pharmacodynamics describes the intensity of the response to these concentrations. In the last decades, the concept of pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic modeling (PK/PD) emerged, which seeks to establish mathematical models to describe the complete time course of the dose-response relationship. The integration of these two fields has had applications in optimizing dose regimens in treating antibacterial and antifungals. The anti-infective PK/PD models predict the relationship between different dosing regimens and their pharmacological activity. The reviewed studies show that PK/PD modeling is an essential and efficient tool for a better understanding of the pharmacological activity of antibacterial and antifungal agents.