Pharsight Corporation, a leading provider of software and strategic services for optimizing clinical drug development, announced today that Bill Poland, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, will speak to members of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries via web conference on HIV drug-disease modeling on February 28, 2006 at 1:30 PM Eastern Time. Dr. Poland's presentation, titled "Modeling and Simulation to Support HIV Drug Development Decisions" will discuss the use and strategic value of integrated adherence, PK-PD, and trial modeling and simulation for antiretrovirals approaching Phase II/III development. More information is available at its Web site. "HIV presents special therapeutic challenges to the drug development team, including resistance, complex pharmacokinetics, and patient compliance," said Shawn O'Connor, President and CEO of Pharsight. "Our modeling and simulation approach in HIV, as in other therapeutic domains, is to integrate relevant sub-models, estimate key parameters from trial data, and simulate candidate trial designs. The business benefits can include optimizing the design of the next trial or sequence of trials, better go/no-go decisions, and strategies to optimize unavoidable tradeoffs such as that between patient compliance and difficult dosing."