EXTON, PA – April 26, 2011 – Absorption Systems today announced the results of another study demonstrating the unique power of the company’s CellPort Technologies® to predict the potential for pharmacokinetic drug-drug interactions.
The study, published online in Drug Metabolism and Disposition – one of the leading journals in the field of drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics – examined several statin drugs, which are widely used to lower cholesterol. Using Absorption Systems’ proprietary technology, company scientists, in collaboration with a colleague at the FDA, confirmed what had previously been suspected regarding which drug transporters are responsible for eliminating the drugs from the body. Such results can be important for predicting and understanding drug-drug interactions and toxicity.
CellPort Technologies is a suite of preclinical in vitro test systems designed to provide definitive data regarding interactions between new drugs under investigation and specific transport proteins that have been identified by the FDA as key mediators of drug safety. Absorption Systems scientists used a novel approach to create a panel of human cell lines in which the expression of one efflux transporter at a time is knocked down. It then becomes a simple process of elimination to determine, in a very unambiguous way, which efflux transporter(s) is/are sites of interaction.
“We were very excited to collaborate with the FDA on this research project, especially since the agency helped fund the development of these tools through Phase I and Phase II SBIR grants” said Patrick M. Dentinger, President and CEO of Absorption Systems. “This study demonstrates CellPort’s unique ability to predict or explain potentially harmful drug-drug interactions.”
The collaborative study with the FDA was another demonstration of the power of this approach to explain certain clinical drug-drug interactions. Going forward, drug developers are increasingly utilizing tools such as CellPort proactively to anticipate and avoid such interactions before they occur.
The complete manuscript is available online at
http://dmd.aspetjournals.org/content/early/2011/03/29/dmd.111.038075.full.pdf+html and will be in print in Drug Metabolism and Disposition, which is published by the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, in the coming months.
About Absorption Systems
Absorption Systems, founded in 1996, assists pharmaceutical and medical device companies in identifying and overcoming ADMET (Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, Excretion and Toxicity) barriers in the development of drugs and medical devices. The company’s mission is to continually develop innovative research tools that can be used to accurately predict human outcomes or to explain unanticipated human outcomes when they occur. The CellPort Technologies® platform, a suite of human cell-based test systems for drug transporter characterization, exemplifies Absorption Systems’ commitment to innovation and is soon to be an industry assay standard for in vitro drug interaction assessment. Absorption Systems has facilities near Philadelphia, PA, and San Diego, CA, and serves customers throughout the world. For information on the company’s comprehensive contract services and applied research programs, please visit www.absorption.com.
