Drug Kinetics – Multimedia

The purpose is to study the role of multidrug resistance-associated protein 5, MRP5 in drug metabolism in human retinal pigment epithelium (RPE). RPE forms the outer part of blood-retinal barrier (BRB) which restricts movements of solutes from systemic bloodstream to the neural retina. The efflux protein, MPR5 is expressed in RPE but its functions are mainly unknown. SiRNA will be tested as a tool to clarify the role of MRP5.

The expression of CYP enzymes is influenced by both endogenous and exogenous factors. The aim of this analysis was to evaluate whether the age, gender, or ethnicity of the donor should influence the selection of human liver microsomes for drug metabolism studies, as well as whether cigarette smoking and alcohol consumption are reliable indicators of elevated CYP1A2 and CYP2E1 activity, respectively.

Following the identification of a lead compound, the usual next step is optimization of that lead via slight structural modifications to improve or retain potency while simultaneously minimizing liabilities. Achieving this balance of required properties is a significant challenge. ACD/Structure Design Suite is a software tool that significantly helps the medicinal compounds that are expected to produce analogs with improved selected physicochemical properties.

With the increasing application of high-throughput assays for the determination of the in vitro ADME properties of compounds in lead identification and optimization, there is a growing need for efficient and cost-effective methods for interpreting theresulting data to enable well-informed selection to be made for compound progression.

The PatchXpress® 7000A patch clamp system is an automated electrophysiology workstation that allows users to increase throughput of research quality recordings and to measure ion channel activity from nearly any channel type.

At the later stages of drug optimization it is beneficial to augment the select ADME properties of leads by making small structural changes that do not introduce any negative effects on the activity or toxicity profiles. By combining physicochemical property predictors and a critically evaluated database of biologically-acceptable substituents, the synthetic chemist can evaluate and reduce the number of derivative compounds that need to be synthesized to achieve optimal drug-like properties.