Honors Program
Honors in Mathematics
Date of Award
5-2016
Thesis Professor(s)
Michele M. Joyner
Thesis Professor Department
Mathematics and Statistics
Thesis Reader(s)
Allan Forsman, Jeff Knisley
Abstract
Levofloxacin is in a class of antibiotics known as fluoroquinolones, which treat infections by killing the bacteria that cause them. A physiologically-based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) model was developed to investigate the uptake, distribution, and elimination of Levofloxacin after a single dose. PBPK modeling uses parameters such as body weight, blood flow rates, partition coefficients, organ volumes, and several other parameters in order to model the distribution of a particular drug throughout the body. Levofloxacin is only moderately bound in human blood plasma, and, thus, for the purposes of this paper, linear bonding is incorporated into the model because the free or unbound portion of the drug is the only portion that is considered to be medicinally effective. Parameter estimation is then used to estimate the two unknown parameters given clinical data from literature on the total concentration of Levofloxacin in the blood over time. Once an adequate model is generated, the effects of varying Body Mass Index are tested for the absorption and distribution of Levofloxacin throughout the body.
Publisher
East Tennessee State University
Document Type
Honors Thesis - Open Access
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Recommended Citation
McCartt, Paezha M., "A Physiologically-Based Pharmacokinetic Model for the Antibiotic Levofloxacin" (2016). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 343. https://dc.etsu.edu/honors/343
Copyright
Copyright by the authors.