Practical PK Calculators

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This page contains Drug Hunter's practical PK calculators useful for day-to-day drug discovery, including a PK unit converter such as for uM to ng/mL unit conversion, an animal study requirement calculator for how much material to synthesize in preparation for animal studies, and a simple human equivalent dose estimator.

Who doesn't find themselves periodically scratching their heads at the units other people choose to report their data in? If you're a chemist, it's annoying to find a chart in mass units (g/mL) when you care about concentration (M). If you're the person planning or weighing out the material for the actual PK studies, it probably doesn't help when your chemist gives you a target concentration and a chemical structure that you couldn't distinguish from chickenwire if you tried.

Here are some basic calculators to start. Hope this makes your life a little easier. You may also find our PK reference table (PK Cheat Sheet) useful for this.

Having a brain freeze trying to read PK/PD or efficacy results in ng/mL? Check this calculator!

PK Unit Converter

This calculator converts between common concentration units used in PK (e.g. uM to ng/ML)

Conversion Type (Required)

Drug MW (Required)

Input Conc. (uM) (Required)

Concentration (ng/mL)

Concentration (ug/mL)

Planning a study and need a quick guesstimate for how much material you need? Check this calculator!

Animal Study Requirement Calculator

This calculator estimates the amount of material you'll need available for a given animal study.

Study Dose (mg/kg)

Length of Study (days)

Animal Body Weight (kg)

(mouse = 0.02-0.025, rat = 0.18-0.25, cyno = 2.0, beagle = 10.0, human = 70.0)

Animals per Group (#)

Typically 10 for a xenograft study, 3 for a PK study

Overhead (%)

Extra material in reserve in case of animal weight gain or compound loss

Doses per Day (#)

(e.g. QD = 1, TID = 3, QW = 0.143)

Quantity Needed for Study (mg)

Have a dose from animal studies and want to guesstimate what the human equivalent dose would be using simple allometric scaling assumptions? Check this calculator! This does not factor in any kind of cross-species biochemical differences.

Simple Human Equivalent Dose Calculator

This calculator uses basic allometric scaling to very roughly estimate drug doses across species based on the FDA guidance, “Estimating the Maximum Safe Starting Dose in Initial Clinical Trials for Therapeutics in Adult Healthy Volunteers.”

Animal with Known Dose

Known Dose (mg/kg)

Human Equivalent Dose (mg/kg)

0.000

Mouse to Human

Estimated Human Dose (mg)

0.000

Mouse to 70 kg Human

These calculators were suggested and mapped out thanks to Dr. Berenger Biannic.

Practical PK Calculators

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