Ocular pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics

Delivering drugs to the front of the eye is an exceedingly complicated issue because of the numerous protective mechanisms that are present in the eye to shield the visual pathway from foreign chemicals. Design of modern ocular drug delivery systems is based on an understanding of the drug disposition pathways in the eye and the overall ocular pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic profile. Appropriate mathematical models to describe and predict drug disposition and response have evolved over the past twenty years and have become reasonably sophisticated. In this paper we review various ocular pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic models for different model drugs and drug delivery systems.