Challenges Associated With Applying Physiologically Based Pharmacokinetic Modeling for Public Health Decision-Making

Abstract

The development and application of physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) models in chemical toxicology have grown steadily since their emergence in the 1980s. However, critical evaluation of PBPK models to support public health decision-making across federal agencies has thus far occurred for only a few environmental chemicals. In order to encourage decision-makers to embrace the critical role of PBPK modeling in risk assessment, several important challenges require immediate attention from the modeling community. The objective of this contemporary review is to highlight 3 of these challenges, including: (1) difficulties in recruiting peer reviewers with appropriate modeling expertise and experience; (2) lack of confidence in PBPK models for which no tissue/plasma concentration data exist for model evaluation; and (3) lack of transferability across modeling platforms. Several recommendations for addressing these 3 issues are provided to initiate dialog among members of the PBPK modeling community, as these issues must be overcome for the field of PBPK modeling to advance and for PBPK models to be more routinely applied in support of public health decision-making.

Figure 1.

Number of articles referencing physiologically based pharmacokinetic models for drugs or environmental chemicals that have been published over the last several decades. The keyword search included “pbpk OR (“physiologically based” AND (pharmacokinetic OR toxicokinetic”, resulting in articles first identified in 1977 in the PubMed literature database.