Pharmacokinetics

Summary

openPK (Fig. 1) is an interactive website I developed to simulate pharmacokinetic concentration–time profiles. Users can adjust parameters such as dose, body weight, and others, and immediately observe how drug concentrations evolve within the body.

The project started with a simple real-world question — whether 500 mg of paracetamol is “too much.” To answer this reliably, I implemented a multi-compartment PK model from the scientific literature and combined it with reference values for therapeutic and toxic concentration ranges. From this initial use case, the project evolved into a general tool for PK exploration.

openPK demonstrates how scientific models can be translated into accessible, web-based applications that:

• make pharmacokinetic principles intuitive,
• illustrate how individual parameters affect exposure,
• and highlight fundamental concepts of personalized medicine, where patient-specific characteristics lead to different concentration–time outcomes.

The project showcases how digital simulations can support more individualized therapeutic understanding, making drug behaviour more transparent for both lay users and healthcare professionals.