Pharmacokinetic Profiles Determine Optimal Combination Treatment Schedules in Computational Models of Drug Resistance

Identification of optimal schedules for combination drug administration relies on accurately estimating the correct pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, and drug interaction effects. Misspecification of pharmacokinetics can lead to wrongly predicted timing or order of treatments, leading to schedules recommended on the basis of incorrect assumptions about absorption and elimination of a drug and its effect on tumor growth. Here, we developed a computational modeling platform and software package for combination treatment strategies with flexible pharmacokinetic profiles and multidrug interaction curves that are estimated from data. The software can be used to compare prespecified schedules on the basis of the number of resistant cells where drug interactions and pharmacokinetic curves can be estimated from user-provided data or models. We applied our approach to publicly available in vitro data of treatment with different tyrosine kinase inhibitors of BT-20 triple-negative breast cancer cells and of treatment with erlotinib of PC-9 non-small cell lung cancer cells. Our approach is publicly available in the form of an R package called ACESO (https://github.com/Michorlab/aceso) and can be used to investigate optimum dosing for any combination treatment. SIGNIFICANCE: These findings introduce a computational modeling platform and software package for combination treatment strategies with flexible pharmacokinetic profiles and multidrug interaction curves that are estimated from data.