Developmental Expression of Drug Transporters and Conjugating Enzymes Involved in Enterohepatic Recycling: Implication for Pediatric Drug Dosing

Abstract

Around 50% of the drugs used in children have never been tested for safety and efficacy in this vulnerable population. Immature drug elimination pathways can lead to drug toxicity when pediatric doses are determined using empirical methods such as body‐surface area or body‐weight‐normalized adult dosing. In the absence of clinical data, physiologically‐based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) modeling has emerged as a useful tool to predict drug pharmacokinetics in children. These models utilize developmental physiological data, including age‐dependent differences in the abundance of drug‐metabolizing enzymes and transporters (DMET), to mechanistically extrapolate adult pharmacokinetic data to children. The reported abundance data of hepatic DMET proteins in subcellular fractions isolated from frozen tissue are prone to high technical variability. Therefore, we carried out the proteomics‐based quantification of hepatic drug transporters and conjugating enzymes in 50 pediatric and 8 adult human hepatocyte samples. Out of the 34 studied proteins, 28 showed a significant increase or decrease with age. While MRP6, OAT7, and SULT1E1 were highest in < 1‐year‐old samples, the abundance of P‐gp and UGT1A4 was negligible in < 1‐year‐old samples and increased significantly after 1 year of age. Incorporation of the age‐dependent abundance data in PBPK models can help improve pediatric dose prediction, leading to safer drug pharmacotherapy in children.