Pharmacometrics versus toxicometrics: (dys)similarities?

Whether one develops work in the field of pharmacology or in the field of toxicology, one can identify many points of both convergence and discrepancies. This is what this presentation proposes to highlight by identifying in these two major research areas what can be considered as similar or not in terms of questioning, hypotheses, mechanisms, experimental considerations, as well as modelling approaches. We will especially focus on quantitative approaches in both fields leading to either pharmacometrics or toxicometrics, that is methods in support of decision making either by health care personnel in the field of pharmacology, or by regulatory agencies in risk assessment in the field of environmental toxicology. Our comparison of quantitative approaches in pharmacology and toxicology will be based on two concrete examples. The first one comes from pharmacology and more specifically from the use of pharmacometrics on anti-infective agents employed in treatment of cystic fibrosis to better determine the right dose of antibiotics to use accounting for the between-individual variability. The second one comes from ecotoxicology where toxicometrics are used to assess environmental risks on freshwater invertebrates when they are exposed to heavy metals accounting for internal contamination routes. For both examples, kinetics modelling frameworks as recently developed will be presented and compared in their (dys)similarities.