Pharmacokinetic analysis at the organ level provides insight into how drugs distribute throughout the body but cannot explain how drugs work at the cellular level. Here we demonstrate in vivo single cell pharmacokinetic imaging of PARP-1 inhibitors (PARPi) and model drug behavior under varying conditions. We visualize intracellular kinetics of PARPi distribution in real time, showing that PARPi reaches its cellular target compartment, the nucleus, within minutes in vivo both in cancer and normal cells in various cancer models. We also use these data to validate predictive finite element modeling. Our theoretical and experimental data indicate that tumor cells are exposed to sufficiently high PARPi concentrations in vivo and suggest that drug inefficiency is likely related to proteomic heterogeneity or insensitivity of cancer cells to DNA repair inhibition. This suggests that single cell pharmacokinetic imaging and derived modeling improves our understanding of drug action at single cell resolution in vivo.