Characterization of Correction Factors to Enable Assessment of Clinical Risk from In Vitro CYP3A4 Induction Data and Basic Drug-Drug Interaction Models

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Induction of drug-metabolizing enzymes can lead to drug-drug interactions (DDIs); therefore, early assessment is often conducted. Previous reports focused on true positive cytochrome P450 3A (CYP3A) inducers leaving a gap in translation for in vitro inducers which do not manifest in clinical induction. The goal herein was to expand the in vitro induction dataset by including true negative clinical inducers to identify a correction factor to basic DDI models, which reduces false positives without impacting false negatives. METHODS: True negative clinical inducers were identified through a literature search, in vitro induction parameters were generated in three human hepatocyte donors, and the performance of basic induction models proposed by regulatory agencies, concentration producing twofold induction (F2), basic static model (R3) and relative induction score (RIS), was used to characterize clinical induction risk. RESULTS: The data demonstrated the importance of correcting for in vitro binding and metabolism to derive induction parameters. The aggregate analysis indicates that the RIS with a positive cut-off of < 0.7-fold area under the curve ratio (AUCR) provides the best quantitative prediction. Additionally, correction factors of ten and two times the unbound peak plasma concentration at steady state (C(max,ss,u)) can be confidently used to identify true positive inducers when referenced against the concentration resulting in twofold increase in messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) or using the R3 equation, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: These iterative improvements, which reduce the number of false positives, could aid regulatory recommendations and limit unnecessary clinical explorations into CYP3A induction. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT: [Image: see text] SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13318-022-00763-y.