Clinical Trial Data-Driven Risk Assessment of Drug–Drug Interactions: A Rapid and Accurate Decision-Making Tool

In clinical practice, the vast array of potential drug combinations necessitates swift and accurate assessments of pharmacokinetic drug–drug interactions (DDIs), along with recommendations for adjustments. Current methodologies for clinical DDI evaluations primarily rely on basic extrapolations from clinical trial data. However, these methods are limited in accuracy owing to their lack of a comprehensive consideration of various critical factors, including the inhibitory potency, dosage, and type of the inhibitor, as well as the metabolic fraction and intestinal availability of the substrate.

This study aims to propose an efficient and accurate clinical pharmacokinetic-mediated DDI assessment tool, which comprehensivelyconsiders the effects of inhibitory potency and dosage of inhibitors, intestinal availability and fraction metabolized of substrates on DDIoutcomes.

This study focuses on DDIs caused by cytochrome P450 3A4 enzyme inhibition, utilizing extensive clinical trial data to establish a methodology to calculate the metabolic fraction and intestinal availability for substrates, as well as the concentration and inhibitory potency for inhibitors ( \({K}_{\text{i}}\) $K_{\text{i}}$ or \({k}_{\text{inact}}/{K}_{\text{I}}\) $k_{\text{inact}}/K_{\text{I}}$ ). These parameters were then used to predict the outcomes of DDIs involving 33 substrates and 20 inhibitors. We also defined the risk index for substrates and the potency index for inhibitors to establish a clinical DDI risk scale. The training set for parameter calculation consisted of 73 clinical trials. The validation set comprised 89 clinical DDI trials involving 53 drugs. which was used to evaluate the reliability of in vivo values of \({\text{K}}_{\text{i}}\) ${\text{K}}_{\text{i}}$ and \({k}_{\text{inact}}/{K}_{\text{I}}\) $k_{\text{inact}}/K_{\text{I}}$ , the accuracy of DDI predictions, and the false-negative rate of risk scale.

First, the reliability of the in vivo \({K}_{\text{i}}\) $K_{\text{i}}$ and \({k}_{\text{inact}}/{K}_{\text{I}}\) $k_{\text{inact}}/K_{\text{I}}$ values calculated in this study was assessed using a basic static model. Compared with values obtained from other methods, this study values showed a lower geometric mean fold error and root mean square error. Additionally, incorporating these values into the physiologically based pharmacokinetic-DDI model facilitated a good fitting of the C–t curves when the substrate’s metabolic enzymes are inhibited. Second, area under the curve ratio predictions of studied drugs were within a 1.5 × margin of error in 81% of cases compared with clinical observations in the validation set. Last, the clinical DDI risk scale developed in this study predicted the actual risks in the validation set with only a 5.6% incidence of serious false negatives.

This study offers a rapid and accurate approach for assessing the risk of pharmacokinetic-mediated DDIs in clinical practice, providing a foundation for rational combination drug use and dosage adjustments.