ABSTRACT
I. INTRODUCTION Dose-response experiments are very frequently carried out as parts of drug and chemical development and evaluation programs in many areas of toxicology, pharmacology, and the biomedical sciences. In this chapter we discuss an approach to the experimental design of such studies when the responses are dichotomous (i.e., success or failure, yes or no, 0 or 1, etc.). The results from such quantal response studies are used to estimate dose-response distributions that specify the relation between dose and effect. For example, in the case of a drug development application, the dose-response distribution might represent the probability of obtaining an efficacious response (e.g., alleviation of disease symptoms) as a function of drug dose. Usually, but not always, the probability of efficacious response increases in a monotonic fashion as the administered drug dose increases.
