Inferring pulmonary exposure based on clinical PK data: accuracy and precision of model-based deconvolution methods

Determining and understanding the target-site exposure in clinical studies remains challenging. This is especially true for oral drug inhalation for local treatment, where the target-site is identical to the site of drug absorption, i.e., the lungs. Modeling and simulation based on clinical pharmacokinetic (PK) data may be a valid approach to infer the pulmonary fate of orally inhaled drugs, even without local measurements. In this work, a simulation-estimation study was systematically applied to investigate five published model structures for pulmonary drug absorption. First, these models were compared for structural identifiability and how choosing an inadequate model impacts the inference on pulmonary exposure. Second, in the context of the population approach both sequential and simultaneous parameter estimation methods after intravenous administration and oral inhalation were evaluated with typically applied models. With an adequate model structure and a well-characterized systemic PK after intravenous dosing, the error in inferring pulmonary exposure and retention times was less than twofold in the majority of evaluations. Whether a sequential or simultaneous parameter estimation was applied did not affect the inferred pulmonary PK to a relevant degree. One scenario in the population PK analysis demonstrated biased pulmonary exposure metrics caused by inadequate estimation of systemic PK parameters. Overall, it was demonstrated that empirical modeling of intravenous and inhalation PK datasets provided robust estimates regarding accuracy and bias for the pulmonary exposure and pulmonary retention, even in presence of the high variability after drug inhalation. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10928-021-09780-x.