A Quantitative Systems Pharmacology (QSP) Approach to Understand the Pathogenesis of Acne and Evaluate New Acne Therapies

Quantitative Systems Pharmacology provides an integrated "systems approach" to model the mechanism of action and clinical outcomes for new and existing drugs, as well as obtain a deeper understanding of the pathogenesis of the disease. It has thus emerged as an important tool to advance the discovery and development of therapeutic drugs. In this talk, the application of QSP for modeling the pathogenesis of a skin disease, acne, will be presented. Acne is a multifactorial disease with limited understanding of its pathogenesis. Therefore, a QSP based approach was used to understand the interplay between the processes involved in acne such as sebum production, P. acnes growth and inflammation etc. and their role in disease progression. Novel acne treatments were simulated inhibiting potential new targets and the results were compared with currently available acne treatments. In addition, different virtual patients have been simulated to identify the patient subsets that can benefit most from these novel acne treatments.