TY - JOUR T1 - Mechanistic modeling of pitavastatin disposition in sandwich-cultured human hepatocytes: a proteomics-informed bottom-up approach JF - Drug Metabolism and Disposition JO - Drug Metab Dispos DO - 10.1124/dmd.115.066746 SP - dmd.115.066746 AU - Anna Vildhede AU - Andre Mateus AU - Elin K Khan AU - Yurong Lai AU - Maria Karlgren AU - Per Artursson AU - Maria C Kjellsson Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://dmd.aspetjournals.org/content/early/2016/02/03/dmd.115.066746.abstract N2 - Isolated human hepatocytes are commonly used to predict transporter-mediated clearance in vivo. Such predictions, however, do not provide estimations of transporter contributions and consequently do not allow predictions of the outcome resulting from a change in the activity of a certain transporter, e.g., by inhibition or a genetic variant with reduced function. Pitavastatin is a drug that is heavily dependent on hepatic transporters for its elimination and it is mainly excreted as unchanged drug in the bile. For this reason, pitavastatin was used as a model drug to demonstrate the applicability of a bottom-up approach to predict transporter-mediated disposition in sandwich-cultured human hepatocytes (SCHH), allowing for the estimation of transporter contributions. Transport experiments in transfected HEK293 cells and inverted membrane vesicles overexpressing each of the relevant transport proteins were used to generate parameter estimates for the mechanistic model. By adjusting for differences in transporter abundance between the in vitro systems and individual SCHH batches, the model successfully predicted time profiles of medium and intracellular accumulation. Our predictions of pitavastatin bile accumulation could, however, not be confirmed due to a very low biliary excretion of pitavastatin in relation to the hepatic uptake in our SCHH. This study is, to our knowledge, the first to successfully simulate transporter-mediated processes in a complex system such as SCHH at the level of individual transport proteins using a bottom-up approach. ER -