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Abstract:
Cancer therapy bene ts today from the availability of new promising classes of drugs such as
therapeutic proteins. Due to their ability to speci cally bind targets in the body they allow to
modulate speci c chemical reactions and ultimately to modify the functional response of the
cell, such as cell growth or cell division. Targeting receptor systems by competitive inhibition
is the objective of various protein drugs in development and on the market. Many targeted
receptor systems also constitute a degradation mechanism for the drug via endocytosis and a
thorough understanding of the complex interplay between the drug's pharmacokinetics and
its e ect, is largely missing.
For complex diseases such as cancer, systems biology models of therapeutically relevant
cellular processes have proven valuable for identifying potent drug targets. So far, such
information about the dynamics of the targeted system is neglected in later stages of the drug
development process when pharmacokinetic modeling is used to guide dose nding and analyze
preclinical or clinical in vivo data. This is especially critical for therapeutic proteins where,
due to the degradation mediated by the targeted receptor, drug e ect and pharmacokinetics
are inherently interdependent.
This thesis combines the points of view of systems biology and pharmacokinetics. We
present a detailed mechanistic model of the targeted cellular system that explicitly takes into
account receptor binding and tra cking inside the cell and that is used to derive reduced
models of drug degradation which retain a mechanistic interpretation. By integrating celllevel
models with established pharmacokinetic models, we translate biophysical properties
of protein drugs into a transient drug e ect in vivo. We illustrate the approach for antibodies
against the epidermal growth factor receptor used in cancer therapy. The cell-level
pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic model identi es options and limits for future therapeutic
antibodies and links their inhibitory e ect with genomic alteration of tumor cells.
