Survey of Pharmaceutical Industry’s Best Practices around In Vitro Transporter Assessment and Implications for Drug Development: Considerations from the International Consortium for Innovation and Quality for Pharmaceutical Development Transporter Working Group

The IQ Transporter Working Group had a rare opportunity to analyse a cross-pharma collation of in vitro data and assay methods for the evaluation of drug transporter substrate and inhibitor potential. Experiments were generally performed in accordance with regulatory guidelines. Discrepancies, such as not considering the impact of pre-incubation for inhibition and free or measured in vitro drug concentrations, may be due to the retrospective nature of the dataset and analysis. Lipophilicity was a frequent indicator of cross-transport inhibition (P-gp, BCRP, OATP1B and OCT1) with high molecular weight ({greater than or equal to}500 Da) also common for OATP1B and BCRP inhibitors. A high level of overlap in in vitro inhibition across transporters was identified for BCRP, OATP1B1 and MATE1 suggesting that prediction of DDIs for these transporters will be common. In contrast inhibition of OAT1 did not coincide with inhibition of any other transporter. Neutrals, bases, and compounds with intermediate-high lipophilicity tended to be P-gp and/or BCRP substrates whilst compounds with MW <500 Da tended to be OAT3 substrates. Interestingly the majority of in vitro inhibitors were not reported to be followed up with a clinical study by the submitting company, whilst those compounds identified as substrates generally were. Approaches to metabolite testing were generally found to be similar to parent testing with metabolites generally being equally or less potent than parent compounds. However, examples where metabolites inhibited transporters in vitro were identified supporting the regulatory requirement for in vitro testing of metabolites to enable integrated clinical DDI risk assessment. Significance Statement A diverse dataset showed transporter inhibition often correlated with lipophilicity and molecular weight (>500 Da). Overlapping transporter inhibition was identified, particularly that inhibition of BCRP, OATP1B1 and MATE1 was frequent if the compound inhibited other transporters. In contrast inhibition of OAT1 did not correlate with the other drug transporters tested.