HN-NonLin is a basic, free tool developed to facilitate the analysis of malaria in vitro drug sensitivity test results. It was originally designed for internal use only but after a number of requests we decided to make it available to the public. It is not ment to compete with commercial, far more sophisticated products. It allows for the entry of raw data obtained from drug sensitivity assays (such as isotopic assays, colorimetric assays or schizont maturation tests), calculates the principal parameters of drug sensitivity (inhibitory concentrations), and plots the dose-response curves for individual isolates, strains or clones.

The idea behind the development of this software was to provide malaria researchers with simple means of data analysis. It is still under development and does not claim to be the one perfect tool. There is a number of other programs for the analysis of in vitro data, which may be far more sofisticated. However, some are relatively difficult to handle, others expensive (which unfortunately is an important issue in malaria research).

Please report any problems or suggestions to help improve the program. There are some known issues, which we hope to address in the near future (especially the model used). If you are a biostatistician and would like to help improve the program (for which I think there is certainly plenty of room left), please feel free to contact me.