Simcyp is pleased to announce the release of it’s latest version of the Simulator, it has extended its repertoire to include a pregnancy model. The additional inclusion of a unique scripting facility, for customising pharmacodynamic response models, allows users more flexibility to code their own models or to use models scripted by others.

The new pregnancy model enables the full-PBPK modelling of concentration-time profiles of drugs in pregnant women accounting for the physiological and anatomical changes encountered through the gestational period. A ‘Pregnancy Population Library’ is provided with the model which contains all the known changes influencing the handling of drugs throughout the different stages of pregnancy as described in a recent publication by the Simcyp R&D group.

The new custom PD scripting functionality incorporated into Simcyp allows users to introduce their own pharmacodynamic models on top of hundreds of built-in PBPK models. PD model scripts can be written using the Lua scripting language (https://www.lua.org/), a lightweight, powerful, easy to learn language that can be simply embedded in other programs.

Commenting on the new release, Professor Amin Rostami, Vice-President of Research and Development at Simcyp, said: “Several of our collaborators have played a significant role in developing and validating the pregnancy model as manifested by several high impact recent publications in top scientific journals. We are delighted to provide these added benefits to our Simcyp Consortium members through externally funded activities. The user scripting facility expands the horizon for PD capabilities and will encourage the pharmacometrics community to embrace the Simulator and use it for their own complex PD models.”

Reflecting on the expansion of the Simcyp platform, Dr Steve Toon, Vice-President of Consulting Services and Technical Sales Support at Simcyp, commented: “Once again Simcyp has added capability that enables a drug development scientist to explore a clinical scenario that would be very difficult to address, due to ethics and practicality, by clinical investigation in real patients.”