A Strategy to Model Nonmonotonic Dose-Response Curve and Estimate IC50

The half-maximal inhibitory concentration IC is an important pharmacodynamic index of drug effectiveness. To estimate this value, the dose response relationship needs to be established, which is generally achieved by fitting monotonic sigmoidal models. However, recent studies on Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) mutants developing resistance to antiviral drugs show that the dose response curve may not be monotonic. Traditional models can fail for nonmonotonic data and ignore observations that may be of biologic significance. Therefore, we propose a nonparametric model to describe the dose response relationship and fit the curve using local polynomial regression. The nonparametric approach is shown to be promising especially for estimating the IC of some HIV inhibitory drugs, in which there is a dose-dependent stimulation of response for mutant strains. This model strategy may be applicable to general pharmacologic, toxicologic, or other biomedical data that exhibits a nonmonotonic dose response relationship for which traditional parametric models fail.