[Population pharmacokinetics and its application in new drug research].

Population pharmacokinetics is an emerging discipline developed from the combination of classical pharmacokinetic compartment model and statistics principles, which has been received more and more attention in recent years. Population pharmacokinetics plays important roles in all stages of new drug research. In the early preclinical phase, population pharmacokinetic analysis can help to achieve the preliminary prediction of parameters from animal to human, optimize clinical trial designs, and shorten the time required for new drugs from laboratory to clinical trials. In clinical trials and applications stage, population pharmacokinetic research can help researchers investigate the related covariates that affecting pharmacokinetic behavior of patients comprehensively, and find potential drug-drug interactions in clinical. In addition, population pharmacokinetics has a unique advantage in pediatric drug development due to its strong analysis ability of sparse data. This paper provides a summary on the history and methods of population pharmacokinetics, and the application in new drug discovery and development.