Model-based clinical drug development in the past, present and future: a commentary

Clinical drug development remains a mostly empirical, costly enterprise, in which decision-making is often based on qualitative assessment of risk, without properly leveraging all the relevant data collected throughout the development programme. Model-based drug development (MBDD) has been proposed by regulatory agencies, academia and pharmaceutical companies as a paradigm to modernize drug research through the quantification of risk and combination of information from different sources across time. We present here a historical account of the use of MBDD in clinical drug development, the current challenges and further opportunities for its application in the pharmaceutical industry.