Matematiska modeller av läkemedelsprojekt

Abstract

Drug development is today controlled by investing in projects or drugs that are believed to provide a big return on investment. The entire process of finding a potential drug until it is possibly sold on the market involves a variety of tests and controls resulting in huge expenses. The vast majority of drug projects undergoing this process do not meet the high demands set on new drugs and is therefore discontinued. This subsequently results in a loss for the pharmaceutical company in that project. It is against this background that Captario has developed a cloud-based tool, Captario SUM. In Captario SUM, an user is able to construct a mathematical model over their pharmaceutical project and simulate the outcome to obtain a forecast of profitability and other interesting aspects of the project. In this report we investigate the impact variations in the variables, of such a model, have on the forecast that is obtained. We have chosen to focus only on the forecast of net present value which is a measure of profitability. To our help, we use methods in the field emph sensitivity analysis which have been implemented on a prototypical model of a pharmaceutical project. A secondary goal during the project has been to try to find suitable methods that Captario in the future will be able to integrate with the tool and further offer their customers a sensitivity analysis on their models. After this investigation we found various sensitivity analysis methods that are well suitable for Captarios tool. All methods identified that the recruitment rate for one of the larger studies was the variable that had the greatest impact for profitability. Furthermore, this report can be seen as a first step in the analysis of drug development models and it is discussed how one could proceed with a deeper analysis.