Variable Responses to Tacrolimus

Tacrolimus is a drug that given as an immunosuppressant for transplant patients to reduce the risk of transplant organ rejection. Therapeutic drug mentoring is done on patients receiving this drug, however, patients still demonstrate huge variability in terms of their response to the drug. This variability could be a result of interindividual differences in the pharmacokinetics, the pharmacodynamics, or both. Both of the current papers primarily aim to develop population pharmacokinetic models that allow us to better understand the pharmacokinetics of tacrolimus. Additionally, population pharmacokinetic studies enable us to evaluate the effect of certain factors “covariates” as a cause of the interindividual variability seen between patients.

As a group, we agreed that Monchaud et al paper is more significant clinically. Monchaud paper was published in Clinical Pharmacokinetics journal that hold an impact factor of 6.1. This paper is interesting as it the first paper to perform population pharmacokinetic analysis for tacrolimus in lung transplant patients. Also, the authors was able...