Incremental innovations in the pharmaceutical field are typically analogs of the radical innovation. The application of modeling and simulation (M&S) methods to improve decision-making was discussed during the Trends & Innovations in Clinical Trial Statistics Conference held in Durham, North Carolina, USA on May 1–4, 2016. Uses of both pharmacometric and statistical M&S were presented during the conference, highlighting the diversity of the methods employed by pharmacometricians and statisticians to address a broad range of quantitative issues in drug development. Pharmacokinetics refers to the movement of drugs into, through and out of the body. The type of response of an individual to a particular drug depends on the inherent pharmacological properties of the drug at its site of action. Clinical pharmacokinetics is the application of pharmacokinetic principles to the safe and effective therapeutic management of drugs in an individual patient. Pharmacokinetics is an area of pharmacology concerned with the time course of absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion (collectively ADME) of drugs from biological systems in order to understand the effect of the drug, or of the organism, on the drug's impact. Pharmacokinetic parameters can also include toxicology and a drug’s liberation from its medicinal formulation. Pharmacokinetics is how a body processes a drug.