Current Drug Discovery Technologies - Volume 7, Issue 3, 2010

Improvement in research and development (R&D) productivity via leveraging the probability of technical success to efficiently bring the medicine to the market is a determining factor in maintaining a growing and sustainable pharmaceutical industry. The modern technology advance in drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics (DMPK) plays a key role in the drug discovery and development paradigms in selecting therapeutic dr Read More

There have been major strides in the development of novel ways of investigating drug like properties of new chemical entities (NCE) in the last three decades. Identification of ideal properties of a clinical candidate that would give a clinical proof of concept (POC) is the most critical step in the discovery process. Besides the biological dose-response relationship, the pharmacokinetic parameters play the most vital role in infl Read More

Glutathione (GSH) levels are modulated in human liver slices to evaluate if drug induced liver injury is enhanced by a poor liver GSH status. Liver slice GSH levels were decreased by: 1) BSO (L-buthionine-S-sulfoximine) to inhibit GSH synthesis, and by 2) APAP (acetaminophen) which consumes GSH via conjugation to a metabolite. In this study, methimazole (MMI) liver injury was evaluated in the presence of a poor GSH status. M Read More

In this study we employed the use of the Meteor computational software program to perform predictions in silico on 17 hepatotoxic drugs for determining human-specific drug metabolites. Congruence of the in silico predictions from a qualitative standpoint of drug metabolite structures was established by comparison to human in vivo drug metabolic profiles characterized in publically available clinical studies. A total of 8 Read More

The liver is the primary site of metabolism for most drugs. Its major roles include detoxification of the systemic and portal blood, and production and secretion of critical blood and biliary components. A number of liver-derived in vitro systems, such as slices, primary and immortalized hepatocytes, microsomes and S9 fractions are used to assess the metabolism and potential toxicity of new chemical entities. Over the p Read More

Drug-drug interactions DDI comprise a significant cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide as they may lead to adverse clinical events, result in decrease/inactivation of the therapeutic effect of a drug, may enhance drug toxicity and indirectly compromise treatment outcomes and adherence. Drug transporters and drug metabolism enzymes govern drug absorption, distribution, metabolism, and elimination (ADME). Read More

Hydrophilic interaction chromatography (HILIC) offers a difference in selectivity as compared to traditional normal phase and reversed-phase liquid chromatography and therefore has great potential for the separation of a variety of pharmaceuticals. This review is devoted to summarizing HILIC coupled to tandem mass spectrometric (MS/MS) methods for the rapid, sensitive and accurate determinations of small molecules emplo Read More