The Open Systems Pharmacology Suite (PK-Sim® & MoBi®): An open source solution for whole-body physiologically based pharmacokinetics and -dynamics
Thomas Wendl on behalf of Open Systems Pharmacology
www.open-systems-pharmacology.org (Author’s affiliation: Bayer AG)
Objectives: To present the Open Systems Pharmacology Suite (OSPS), an open source systems pharmacology project making formerly commercial software tools PK-Sim® and MoBi® [1-3] available under GPLv2.
Methods: For details and to follow the community’s activities, please see GitHub [3].
Results: The OSPS contains different software tools and has been designed using a modular concept to allow efficient, flexible, and transparent multi-scale modeling and simulation. The overall platform with its various software tools is implemented in a modular way. The central software tools PK-Sim® and MoBi® make use of building blocks and are compatible to each other. While PK-Sim® is based on a whole-body concept, the focus of its counterpart, MoBi®, is at the molecular level.
PK-Sim® is a well-established PBPK tool widely used for more than a decade. It offers different structural models together with relevant physiological and molecular database information for physiologically based pharmacokinetic modeling (PBPK) of small and large molecules in different animal species and human populations. It includes efficient methods for parameter identification and sensitivity analysis as well as easy-to-use features for cross-species extrapolation, pediatric scaling, or the study of drug-drug interactions among others.
MoBi® can directly use PBPK models created in PK-Sim® but is especially designed for the de novo construction, import, or extension of systems biology and pharmacology models in an (extendible) ordinary differential equation framework. Together with interfaces to general computing environments Matlab® (The MathWorks, Inc., Natick, USA) and R, it provides a flexible solution for modeling and simulation. For further details on the software and the open source project see [3].
Conclusions: The Open Systems Pharmacology Suite makes powerful and flexible tools for PBPK and systems pharmacology modeling available open source under GPLv2. We invite everyone in the field of Systems Pharmacology, be it in academia, industry or regulatory bodies, to use the platform. Active participation of computer and modeling & simulation scientists in the further development of the modeling & simulation platform, the incorporated systems models, processes for their qualification and application etc. is encouraged and highly welcome. Please follow the community’s activities in this GitHub project [3].
References:
[1] Willmann S, Lippert J, Sevestre M, Solodenko J, Fois F, Schmitt W. PK-Sim®: a physiologically based pharmacokinetic ‘whole-body’ model. Biosilico. 2003; 1 (4): 121-124.
[2] Eissing T, Kuepfer L, Becker C, Block M, Coboeken K, Gaub T, Goerlitz L, Jaeger J, Loosen R, Ludewig B, Meyer M, Niederalt C, Sevestre M, Siegmund H, Solodenko J, Thelen K, Telle U, Weiss W, Wendl T, Willmann S, Lippert J. A computational systems biology software platform for multiscale modeling and simulation: Integrating whole-body physiology, disease biology, and molecular reaction networks. Front Physio 2:4.
[3] Open Systems Pharmacology Suite website and user manual at www.open-systems-pharmacology.org.
