Comparative Assessment of In Vitro–In Vivo Extrapolation Methods used for Predicting Hepatic Metabolic Clearance of Drugs

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to perform a comparative analysis of various in vitro--in vivo extrapolation (IVIVE) methods used for predicting hepatic metabolic clearance (CL) of drugs on the basis of intrinsic CL data determined in microsomes. Five IVIVE methods were evaluated: the "conventional and conventional bias-corrected methods" using the unbound fraction in plasma (fu(p) ), the "Berezhkovskiy method" in which the fu(p) is adjusted for drug ionization, the "Poulin et al. method" using the unbound fraction in liver (fu(liver) ), and the "direct scaling method," which does not consider any binding corrections. We investigated the effects of the following scenarios on the prediction of CL: the use of preclinical or human datasets, the extent of plasma protein binding, the magnitude of CL in vivo, and the extent of drug disposition based on biopharmaceutics drug disposition classification system (BDDCS) categorization. A large and diverse dataset of 139 compounds was collected, including those from the literature and in house from Genentech. The results of this study confirm that the Poulin et al. method is robust and showed the greatest accuracy as compared with the other IVIVE methods in the majority of prediction scenarios studied here. The difference across the prediction methods is most pronounced for (a) albumin-bound drugs, (b) highly bound drugs, and (c) low CL drugs. Predictions of CL showed relevant interspecies differences for BDDCS class 2 compounds; the direct scaling method showed the greatest predictivity for these compounds, particularly for a reduced dataset in rat that have unexpectedly high CL in vivo. This result is a reflection of the direct scaling method's natural tendency to overpredict the true metabolic CL. Overall, this study should facilitate the use of IVIVE correlation methods in physiologically based pharmacokinetics (PBPK) model.