Of Rats and Men, a Translational Model to Understand Vancomycin Pharmacokinetic/Toxicodynamic relationships

Background: Vancomycin is a first line antibiotic for many common infectious diseases and is the most commonly prescribed antibiotic in the United States hospital setting. Vancomycin is also well known to cause kidney injury; two recent prospective studies have identified that increasing vancomycin area under the concentration curved predicts vancomycin induced kidney injury (VIKI). However, outside of clinical trials, it is unclear if pre-clinical data can quantitatively describe VIKI in patients. Methods: Data were simultaneously analyzed from a pre-clinical rat model and two prospective clinical studies. Logged vancomycin area under the concentration curve (AUC) data for rats (n=48) and patients from PROVIDE (n=263) and CAMERA2 (n=291) were included. VIKI was defined as urinary KIM-1 concentrations [≥]9.42 ng/mL in the rat and according to KDIGO stage 1 kidney injury for all human patients. Multiple generalized linear models were explored, and the order of magnitude was calculated between the probability of AKI from the average obtained in the clinical studies (i.e. CAMERA2 and PROVIDE) and the rat for 0.1 increments in Log10AUC bounded common concentrations obtained in the therapeutic range (i.e. ~200 -800 mg*24h/L). Results: A logit link model best fit the data. When calculating the multiplicative factors between the studies therapeutic range AUCs, the rat was an average 2.7 to 4.2 times more sensitive to AKI between AUCs of 199.5 (i.e. log 10 AUC=2.3) and 794.3 mg*h/L (i.e. log 10 AUC=2.9), respectively. Conclusions: A pre-clinical rat model was quantitatively linked to toxicity data from two large human studies. The rat is an attractive pre-clinical model to explore exposure toxicity relationships with vancomycin. External validation is required.