"Traditional medicine doesn't consider mechanistic drug response," said Rongling Wu, director of the Center for Statistical Genetics and professor of public health sciences within the division of biostatistics and bioinformatics at the Penn State College of Medicine. "We want to look at how an individual person responds to an individual drug by deriving and using sophisticated mathematical models, such as differential equations."

The current method of prescribing medication now sometimes includes a pharmacogenomic approach, but researchers recognize the limitation of this approach in predicting a response to a particular drug and dosage combination.

Pharmacogenomics uses a person's genes to explain the difference between how one person responds to a drug compared to another. The team's equations take this field one step further by also including information about how the body processes a drug and how the drug acts in the body.