Population pharmacokinetics of nevirapine in Malaysian HIV patients: a non-parametric approach

Nevirapine is the first non-nucleoside reverse-transcriptase inhibitor approved and is widely used in combination therapy to treat HIV-1 infection. The pharmacokinetics of nevirapine was extensively studied in various populations with a parametric approach. Hence, this study was aimed to determine population pharmacokinetic parameters in Malaysian HIV-infected patients with a non-parametric approach which allows detection of outliers or non-normal distribution contrary to the parametric approach.

Nevirapine population pharmacokinetics was modelled with Pmetrics. A total of 708 observations from 112 patients were included in the model building and validation analysis. Evaluation of the model was based on a visual inspection of observed versus predicted (population and individual) concentrations and plots weighted residual error versus concentrations. Accuracy and robustness of the model were evaluated by visual predictive check (VPC). The median parameters' estimates obtained from the final model were used to predict individual nevirapine plasma area-under-curve (AUC) in the validation dataset. The Bland-Altman plot was used to compare the AUC predicted with trapezoidal AUC.

The median nevirapine clearance was of 2.92 L/h, the median rate of absorption was 2.55/h and the volume of distribution was 78.23 L. Nevirapine pharmacokinetics were best described by one-compartmental with first-order absorption model and a lag-time. Weighted residuals for the model selected were homogenously distributed over the concentration and time range. The developed model adequately estimated AUC.

In conclusion, a model to describe the pharmacokinetics of nevirapine was developed. The developed model adequately describes nevirapine population pharmacokinetics in HIV-infected patients in Malaysia.