By identifying and understanding the pharmacokinetics of a given drug or medicine, scientists and researchers get to know its essential properties. How effective the drug is, what is the required dosage in which this should be administered are some of the things which can be brought out with this investigative procedure known as PK Assay.
Pharmacokinetic assay, in brief terms, explains the way our body manipulates the drug. There are basically four types of PK in pharmacology. They are as follows:-
- Absorption
- Distribution
- Metabolism
- Excretion
Advantage Of PK Assay
- Helps in determining what a drug does when it gets mixed in blood. PK assay analysis is usually framed within the period when the drug is injected till the time it is expelled from the body.
- How these outcomes can differ with an equational change in the components of the drug.
- How long the effectiveness of the drugs remains in the human body.
- It also tells what should be the proper interval between doses. The interval is usually relative to the composition or power of the drug.
In Pharmacokinetic pharmacology, a drug, before being released to the market is first applied to the animals. Once the result yields a positive outcome, the same experiment is conducted on humans with their consent to be approved by FDA. This experiment falls under two groups:-
- Single Ascending Dose (SAD) Clinical trial
- Multiple Ascending Dose (MAD) Clinical trial
PK Assay services have the following characteristics
Single Ascending Dose
In a pk assay-
- The number of doses is given to an individual study subject
- Subjects get only one dose of the drug
- Given to observe a rough understanding of the drug’s single-dose pharmacokinetics
Multiple Ascending Dose
In a PK assay service-
- Receives multiple doses of the study drug
- Multiple doses are given to observe the steady-state
- Even after the optimum level is reached, more drugs are given to check how much is eliminated and how much is accumulated in the body
- Provides empirical confirmation
The study of distribution and determinants of health-related events and application of the same to control diseases, illness, and pathologies are known as Epidemiological Studies. One of the studies is Cohort Studies.
What is Cohort Studies?
Cohort studies are defined as a group of people or individuals who share common characteristics or interests. This study is also related to the PK assay. The traits of these studies are:-
- Two types of subjects are brought.
- One subject is exposed to the experiment.
- The other subject is not exposed to the experiment.
- The effects of both the subjects; that is if they are diseased or not diseased are observed.
Advantages
- Provides relative risk; that is, shows the ratio of incidence of disease among exposed and incidence disease among not exposed.
- If the former ratio is greater than the latter one, the outcome is positive.
- Provides definite association between the exposed and diseased entity.
- Confirms the study.
- The experiment is performed in an unbiased manner.
- This is generally a prospective study.
Hence, this article shows how a drug is being constantly tested and experimented with through pharmacokinetics definition or PK assay and cohort studies before bringing it into the market.
