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ADME Pathway Interactive Flow Diagram

Run the ADME Pathway MicroSim Fullscreen

About This MicroSim

Every drug a forensic toxicologist looks for follows the same four-step journey through the body, abbreviated ADME: Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, and Elimination. Understanding this pathway explains why a substance shows up in blood for only hours but in hair for months, and why the route of administration changes how fast a drug peaks.

This MicroSim animates orange "drug molecules" flowing through four organ stages — the GI tract, the bloodstream and tissues, the liver, and the kidneys and lungs — while a blood-concentration curve builds underneath. Choose a route of administration and watch the curve change shape.

How to Use It

  1. Pick a route from the dropdown: oral (swallowed), IV (injected), or inhaled. The animation speed and the concentration curve change to match.
  2. Watch the orange molecules travel left to right through the four ADME stages as the blood-concentration curve fills in below.
  3. Click any stage box to read what happens there — which organs are involved and how long the phase typically takes.
  4. Use Pause / Play to stop on a moment in time and Reset to start over. The dashed marker shows the current time and the relative blood concentration.

What You Can Learn

  • Explain each of the four ADME phases and name the organs responsible.
  • Describe why an IV dose peaks almost instantly while an oral dose rises slowly.
  • Connect blood concentration over time to the detection windows for blood, urine, and hair samples.

You can embed this MicroSim on your own web page with this iframe:

<iframe src="https://dmccreary.github.io/forensic-science/sims/adme-pathway/main.html"
        width="100%" height="517" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Lesson Plan

Audience: High-school forensic science (grades 9–12) Time: 15–20 minutes Bloom level: Understand (L2) — explain the pathway.

Walk-through. Project the sim and step through each stage with the class, clicking the boxes in order and reading the descriptions aloud. Pause the animation at the peak of the curve and ask which ADME phase is dominant.

Guided questions:

  • Switch from oral to IV. Why does the curve peak almost immediately for IV?
  • At t = 12 hours, is the drug more likely to be found in blood or in urine? Why?
  • Which organ does the body rely on to chemically break the drug down, and what enzyme family does the work?

Extension. Have students research a specific drug's half-life and sketch how its ADME curve would differ from the generic shape shown here.

References

Specification

This MicroSim was generated from a specification in Chapter 9: Forensic Toxicology and Chemical Analysis.

Design note: the concentration curve uses a generic Bateman-style absorption/elimination model on a normalized 0–24 hour axis. The shapes and the detection-window ranges are illustrative for teaching the ADME concept, not pharmacokinetic figures for any specific drug.