Evaluation of Drug Interaction in Combination Therapy: Which Statistical Methods Should Be Applied?

• Activity Number: 547
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 7, 2013 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Biopharmaceutical Section
• Author(s): Qin Liu*+ and Xiangfan Yin
• Companies: The Wistar Institute and The Wistar Institute
• Keywords: Drug interaction ; Loewe additivity model ; Synergy ; Response surface model

Abstract

To improve the treatment outcome, interest increases in developing combined therapies for cancer treatment. In the development of combined therapies using in vitro data in pre-clinical research, it is important to screen potential useful combinations of available drugs or compounds and then choose the prominent combinations for further research. To evaluate drug interaction in combination therapies, appropriate statistical methods should be applied to make inferences. Based on Loewe additivity model, we compared several common recommended statistical methods using several published data and showed that different methods may have different results. We explored the reasons and raised some issues for further statistical methodology development on evaluation of drug interactions.