Many drug concentration-effect relationships are described by nonlinear sigmoid models. The 4-parameter Hill model, which belongs to this class, is commonly used. An experimental design is essential to accurately estimate the parameters of the model. In this report we investigate properties of D-optimal designs. D-optimal designs minimize the volume of the confidence region for the parameter estimates or, equivalently, minimize the determinant of the variance-covariance matrix of the estimated parameters. It is assumed that the variance of the random error is proportional to some power of the response. To generate D-optimal designs one needs to assume the values of the parameters. Even when these preliminary guesses about the parameter values are appreciably different from the true values of the parameters, the D-optimal designs produce satisfactory results. This property of D-optimal designs is called robustness. It can be quantified by using D-efficiency. A five-point design consisting of four D-optimal points and an extra fifth point is introduced with the goals to increase robustness and to better characterize the middle part of the Hill curve. Four-point D-optimal designs are then compared to five-point designs and to log-spread designs, both theoretically and practically with laboratory experiments.D-optimal designs proved themselves to be practical and useful when the true underlying model is known, when good prior knowledge of parameters is available, and when experimental units are dear. The goal of this report is to give the practitioner a better understanding for D-optimal designs as a useful tool for the routine planning of laboratory experiments.
Keywords: D-optimal design; Hill model; nonlinear model; parameter estimation.