Drug compounds oral bioavailability

Traditionally, in pursuit of their structure-activity relationships, medicinal chemists had focused almost exclusively on finding compounds with greater and greater potency. However, these SARs often ended up with compounds that were unsuitable for development as pharmaceutical products. These compounds would be too insoluble in water, or were not orally bioavailable, or were eliminated too quickly or too slowly from mammalian bodies. Pharmacologists and pharmaceutical development scientists for years had tried to preach the need for medicinal chemists to also think about other factors that determined whether a compound could be a medicine. Table 1.1 lists a number of factors that determine whether a potent compound has what it takes to become a drug. Experimentally, it was difficult to quantitate these other factors. Often, the necessary manpower resources would not be allocated to a compound until it had already been selected for project team status. 

To maximize safety and therapeutic efficacy, potential drugs are required to be highly specific for their protein target and orally bioavailable. In addition, for a drug candidate to reach the market, it must be patentably novel. A computational approach therefore needs to find novel compounds with well-defined pharmacological properties from the vast space of possible organic compounds ( chemical space ). 

This type of information about a homologous series of drug candidates, when considered in light of the propensity of these compounds to undergo first-pass metabolism and/or liver clearance, allows pharmaceutical scientists to make more intelligent decisions about which compounds to move into animal studies. In addition, when an in vitro-in vivo correlation can be demonstrated for a series of compounds, the results of Caco-2 experiments can be used as a guide by medicinal chemists to make structural modifications to optimize oral bioavailability. 

BCS Class IV Low-solubility, low-permeability drugs. These compounds have very poor oral bioavailability. They are not only difficult to dissolve but often exhibit limited permeability across the GI mucosa. These drugs tend to be very difficult to formulate and can exhibit very large intersubject and intrasubject variability. 

The extent to which the drug can overcome the barriers to its oral delivery is measured by the term oral bioavailability , and this is one of the key determinants of compound quality as it is an indication of the ability of that drug to overcome the barriers to its delivery. 

The genesis of in silico oral bioavailability predictions can be traced back to Lip-inski s Rule of Five and others qualitative attempts to describe drug-like molecules [13-15]. These processes are useful primarily as a qualitative tool in the early stage library design and in the candidate selection. Despite its large number of falsepositive results, Lipinski s Rule of Five has come into wide use as a qualitative tool to help the chemist design bioavailable compounds. It was concluded that compounds are most likely to have poor absorption when the molecular weight is >500, the calculated octan-l-ol/water partition coefficient (c log P) is >5, the number of H-bond donors is >5, and the number of H-bond acceptors is >10. Computation of these properties is now available as an ADME (absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion) screen in commercial software such as Tsar (from Accelrys). The rule-of-5 should be seen as a qualitative, rather than quantitative, predictor of absorption and permeability [16, 17]. 

Oral bioavailability of a drug is primarily dependent upon its rate and extent of drug absorption and systemic clearance. Systemic clearance is primarily composed of hepatic, renal and biliary clearance. The PK properties are in turn directly impacted by the drug s physical properties, such as, log P, log D and pKa. The physical properties are in turn a function of the compound s structure, molecular weight, number of hydrogen bond donors and acceptors, and number of rotatable bonds. Oral bioavailability is the outcome from the dynamic interplay of these factors in the biological system. 

The general definition of the bioavailability (F) of a drug following oral administration is the rate at, and extent to which, a pharmacologically active drug reaches the systemic circulation. The bioavaiiabiiity (F) of a compound is a consequence of several processes shown in Eq. (1) ... 

Pt(TV) Prodrugs. Platinum(IV) complexes have been widely studied as potential prodrugs that avoid the limitations of the cisplatin class of anticancer drugs. Indeed, the Pt(IV) compound satraplatin [Pt(cha)Cl2(OAc)2(NH3)] (cha, cyclohexylamine) is currently in clinical trials for treatment of hormone-refractory prostate cancer (Fig. 1) (22). Satraplatin is the first orally bioavailable platinum derivative under active clinical investigation and is particularly attractive because of the convenience of administration, milder toxicity profile, and lack of cross-resistance with cisplatin. These results are promising and support the idea that platinum(IV) complexes offer the opportunity to overcome some of the problems associated with cisplatin and its analogs. 

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