The use of knowledge-centered models for drug development

Knowledge-centered modeling is an approach to simulating disease processes that represents knowledge about the disease in accordance with the precision and certainties inherent in the knowledge. Because knowledge-centered modeling makes use of a variety of modeling techniques and represents the disease in a hierarchical and modular manner, the resulting model can span the biology of the disease process from the cellular level up to the signs and symptoms of the disease. This characteristic of knowledge-centered modeling allows it to be used to support the three major stages of the drug development process: target discovery, clinical trial design, and pharmacoeconomic analysis.