Our project was specifically looking at modeling the absorption, circulation, and metabolism of morphine. Morphine is an addictive drug (opioid) used clinically as a powerful painkiller. Due to the chemical makeup of morphine, users develop a tolerance for this drug. This causes them to need more and more per each subsequent dosage. Because everyone's body has a different tolerance level for morphine, we were not able to nail down any of our coefficients in our model.
There are some averages published by the University of Lausanne in Switzerland on their pharmacokinetics research site (http://sepia.unil.ch/pharmacology/index.php?id=85). The oral bioavailability (absorption rate) is around 25%, so our k_1 value would be .25. Our k_2 value is the elimination rate, which is defined as either V_max / K_m or as the clearance / volume of distribution. Given that the clearance is 72L/h and the volume of distribution is 245L/70kg, we get a k_2 value of 20.571kg/hr. This volume of distribution is based off a 70kg man, so as we stated before, results vary greatly from person to person.
**Idea taken from Olivia Nguyen and Xiaoyu Shi's paper on modeling the absorption, circulation, and metabolism of tirapazamine.
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