Drugs and Effects: Terminology

When a drug is administered in a biological system, we expect a measured output or effect which depends on the drug’s dosage.1 Usually, when we test drugs on cell lines, the measured output is the viability (response) of the cells, i.e. the percentage of the cells that survived. Generally, the following definitions can be used interchangeably:

  1. %Affected \(f_a\), drug effect \(E\), %death or %inhibition. Note that this definition closely relates to the drug effectiveness itself – how effective was the drug?
  2. %Unaffected \(f_u\), viability, cell growth, survival, globaloutput \(gl\) (used in the DrugLogics pipeline2). Note that this definition relates to the output on the system that the drug is used: e.g. how much were the cells affected by the drug?

Note that the two definitions are complementary: \(f_a+f_u \Rightarrow E+gl=1\).

  1. In this text, dosage and dose are equivalent terms and are used to describe the quantity of the administered drug used↩︎

  2. reference here at some point!↩︎