Reaction Phenotyping: Advances in the Experimental Strategies Used to Characterize the Contribution of Drug-Metabolizing Enzymes

During the process of drug discovery, the pharmaceutical industry is faced with numerous challenges. One challenge is the successful prediction of the major routes of human clearance of new medications. For compounds cleared by metabolism, accurate predictions help provide an early risk assessment of their potential to exhibit significant interpatient differences in pharmacokinetics via routes of metabolism catalyzed by functionally polymorphic enzymes and/or clinically significant metabolic drug-drug interactions. This review details the most recent and emerging in vitro strategies used by drug metabolism and pharmacokinetic scientists to better determine rates and routes of metabolic clearance and how to translate these parameters to estimate the amount these routes contribute to overall clearance, commonly referred to as fraction metabolized. The enzymes covered in this review include cytochrome P450s together with other enzymatic pathways whose involvement in metabolic clearance has become increasingly important as efforts to mitigate cytochrome P450 clearance are successful. Advances in the prediction of the fraction metabolized include newly developed methods to differentiate CYP3A4 from the polymorphic enzyme CYP3A5, scaling tools for UDP-glucuronosyltranferase, and estimation of fraction metabolized for substrates of aldehyde oxidase.