Development of Methods for Assessing Unbound Drug Exposure in the Brain In vivo, in vitro and in silico

Sammanfattning: The blood-brain barrier is formed by tightly joined capillary cells with transporter proteins and acts as to regulate the brain concentration of nutrients as well as many drugs. When developing central nervous system drugs it is necessary to measure the unbound drug concentration in the brain, i.e. the unbound brain exposure. This is to ensure that the drug reaches the site of action. Furthermore, when designing new drugs it is extremely valuable to be able to predict brain exposure from a tentative drug structure.Established methods to measure total drug concentrations are of limited (if any) utility since the pharmacologically active, unbound, concentration is not obtained. The aim of the conducted research was to develop an efficient methodology to measure unbound drug in the brain and to generate a dataset for developing computational prediction models describing the relationship between drug structure and unbound brain exposure.First it was demonstrated that unbound brain exposure can be efficiently assessed using a combination of total drug concentrations in the brain and separate measurements of drug binding in the brain slices. The in vitro brain slice method was refined and made high-throughput. Improvements were also made to the in vivo measurements of total concentrations by introducing an appropriate correction for drug in residual blood.Modeling of a 43-drug dataset in the rat showed that unbound brain exposure is related to the drug hydrogen bonding potential and not to lipid solubility, which contrasts the common understanding. Further, the drug concentrations in cerebrospinal fluid approximated unbound concentrations in the brain (r2=0.80) and were also correlated with corresponding measurements in humans (r2=0.56). Therefore, rat-derived prediction models can be used when designing drugs for humans.This thesis work has provided drug industry and academia with efficient tools to obtain and to use relevant estimates of drug exposure in the brain for evaluating drugs candidates.