Microdosing

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Microdosing, or micro-dosing, involves the administration of sub-therapeutic doses of drugs to study their effects in humans, aiming to gather preliminary data on safety, pharmacokinetics, and potential therapeutic benefits without producing significant physiological effects. This is called a "Phase 0 study" and is usually conducted before clinical Phase I to predict whether a drug is viable for the next phase of testing. Human microdosing aims to reduce the resources spent on non-viable drugs and the amount of testing done on animals. ^[1]

Less commonly, the term "microdosing" is also sometimes used to refer to precise dispensing of small amounts of a drug substance (e.g., a powder API) for a drug product (e.g., a capsule)^[2] and, when the drug substance also happens to be liquid, this can potentially overlap what is termed microdispensing. For example, psychedelic microdosing.^[3]