Absorption Systems' Innovation Rewarded With New US Patent for CellPort Technologies

Absorption Systems recently announced a new US patent issued on January 31 that protects intellectual property around its P-glycoprotein (P-gp) knockdown cell line within the company’s CellPort Technologies brand. The new patent, No. 8,105,828, extends the patent coverage on the company’s transporter knockdown technology beyond previously issued patents in the US, Europe, and Panama. Absorption Systems’ proprietary, cell-based test systems enable drug developers to definitively predict clinical drug-drug interactions (DDIs) involving drug transporters.

DDIs represent an underappreciated healthcare problem and can lead to side effects, therapeutic failure, or death. The antiarrhythmic drug digoxin is the most common victim of DDIs involving P-gp due to its narrow margin of safety. The risk is particularly high among the elderly due to the fact that most elderly people take multiple medications. According to an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, as many as 2.2 million older Americans are at risk of a major DDI, nearly all of which could be avoided with identification, awareness, and avoidance of such combinations.

The newly patented in vitro test systems were the brainchild of Absorption Systems’ Chief Scientist, Dr. Ismael Hidalgo, who leads the company’s research and development in preclinical testing, which includes collaborations with academic, industrial, and US FDA scientists.

“This patent is another validation of our commitment to developing better, more predictive tools that improve drug safety and ultimately save lives. CellPort Technologies can provide very definitive data on drug transporters that is required by regulatory agencies, such as the FDA. And the technology is exclusive to Absorption Systems,” said Dr. Hidalgo.

CellPort Technologies is a suite of cell lines designed to provide definitive data regarding interactions between drugs and specific transport proteins. Drug transporters have been identified by regulatory agencies, such as the FDA and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) as key mediators of unintended DDIs. To create these test systems, Absorption Systems scientists used RNA interference to knock down the expression of one transporter at a time, in such a way that the resulting knockdown phenotypes are stable. By using the knockdown cells in parallel with the parental cells, it becomes very clear, by process of elimination, if a drug interacts with a specific transporter.

Absorption Systems, founded in 1996, assists pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device companies in identifying and overcoming ADMET (Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, Excretion and Toxicity) barriers in the development of drugs, biologics, and medical devices. The company’s mission is to continually develop innovative research tools that can be used to accurately predict human outcomes or to explain unanticipated human outcomes when they occur. The CellPort Technologies platform, a suite of human cell-based test systems for drug transporter characterization, exemplifies Absorption Systems’ commitment to innovation and is soon to be an industry assay standard for in vitro drug interaction assessment.

To learn more about CellPort Technologies and to view a video on the patented knockdown cell lines, visit www.absorption.com/cellport.

The new FDA draft guidance on drug interaction studies is available at http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Drugs/GuidanceComplianceRegulatoryInformation/Guidances/UCM292362.pdf.

EMA draft guideline on the investigation of drug interactions is available at http://www.ema.europa.eu/docs/en_GB/document_library/Scientific_guideline/2010/05/WC500090112.pdf.

The influential International Transporter Consortium white paper on transporters and drug development is available at http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v9/n3/full/nrd3028.html.