Assembling Pharmacometric Datasets in R: The Puzzle Package

Authors

Mario González-Sales, Modeling Great Solution
Olivier Barrière, Certera
Pierre Olivier Tremblay, Syneos Health
Guillaume Bonnefois, Syneos Health
Julie Desrochers, Syneos Health
Fahima Nekka, Université de Montréal - Faculté de Pharmacie

Date of this Version

12-2020

Document Type

Article

Citation

The R Journal (December 2020) 12(2); Editor: Michael J. Kane

Comments

Copyright 2020, The R Foundation. Open access material. License: CC BY 4.0 International

Abstract

Pharmacometric analyses are integral components of the drug development process. The core of each pharmacometric analysis is a dataset. The time required to construct a pharmacometrics dataset can sometimes be higher than the effort required for the modeling per se. To simplify the process, the puzzle R package has been developed aimed at simplifying and facilitating the time consuming and error prone task of assembling pharmacometrics datasets.

Puzzle consist of a series of functions written in R. These functions create, from tabulated files, datasets that are compatible with the formatting requirements of the gold standard non-linear mixed effects modeling software.

With only one function, puzzle(), complex pharmacometrics databases can easily be assembled. Users are able to select from different absorption processes such as zero- and first-order, or a combination of both. Furthermore, datasets containing data from one or more analytes, and/or one or more responses, and/or time dependent and/or independent covariates, and/or urine data can be simultaneously assembled.

The puzzle package is a powerful and efficient tool that helps modelers, programmers and pharmacometricians through the challenging process of assembling pharmacometrics datasets.