Assembling Pharmacometric Datasets in R - The puzzle Package

摘要

Pharmacometric analyses are integral components of the drug development process. The core of each pharmacometric analysis is a dataset. The time required to construct a pharmacometrics dataset can sometimes be higher than the effort required for the modeling per se. To simplify the process, the puzzle R package has been developed aimed at simplifying and facilitating the time consuming and error prone task of assembling pharmacometrics datasets. Puzzle consist of a series of functions written in R. These functions create, from tabulated files, datasets that are compatible with the formatting requirements of the gold standard non-linear mixed effects modeling software. With only one function, puzzle(), complex pharmacometrics databases can easily be assembled. Users are able to select from different absorption processes such as zeroand first-order, or a com bination of both. Furthermore, datasets containing data from one or more analytes, and/or one or more responses, and/or time dependent and/or independent covariates, and/or urine data can be simultaneously assembled. The puzzle package is a powerful and efficient tool that helps modelers, programmers and pharmacometricians through the challenging process of assembling pharmacometrics datasets.