Drug-drug pharmacodynamic interaction detection by a nonparametric population approach. Influence of design and of interindividual variability.

Population approaches are appealing methods for detecting then assessing drug-drug interactions mainly because they can cope with sparse data and quantify the interindividual pharmacokinetic (PK) and pharmacodynamic (PD) variability. Unfortunately these methods sometime fail to detect interactions expected on biochemical and/or pharmacological basis and the reasons of these false negatives are somewhat unclear. The aim of this paper is firstly to propose a strategy to detect and assess PD drug-drug interactions when performing the analysis with a nonparametric population approach, then to evaluate the influence of some design variates (i.e., number of subjects, individual measurements) and of the PD interindividual variability level on the performances of the suggested strategy. Two interacting drugs A and B are considered, the drug B being supposed to exhibit by itself a pharmacological action of no interest in this work but increasing the A effect. Concentrations of A and B after concomitant administration are simulated as well as the effect under various combinations of design variates and PD variability levels in the context of a controlled trial. Replications of simulated data are then analyzed by the NPML method, the concentration of the drug B being included as a covariate. In a first step, no model relating the latter to each PD parameter is specified and the NPML results are then proceeded graphically, and also by examining the expected reductions of variance and entropy of the estimated PD parameter distribution provided by the covariate. In a further step, a simple second stage model suggested by the graphic approach is introduced, the fixed effect and its associated variance are estimated and a statistical test is then performed to compare this fixed effect to a given value. The performances of our strategy are also compared to those of a non-population-based approach method commonly used for detecting interactions. Our results illustrate the relevance of our strategy in a case where the concentration of one of the two drugs can be included as a covariate and show that an existing interaction can be detected more often than with a usual approach. The prominent role of the interindividual PD variability level and of the two controlled factors is also shown.