Teaming up with leaders from across the pharmaceutical industry, Elsevier has developed an updated drug–drug interaction risk calculator (DDIRC) to help lower the incidence of adverse drug reactions (ADRs). The DDIRC was developed as part of a two-year collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim, Eli Lilly, Pierre Fabre, Sanofi, Servier, and several other industry players, to help drug metabolism-pharmacokinetic (DMPK) and clinical pharmacology scientists improve patient safety and outcomes – and reduce risk during pharmaceutical development.
According to Olivier Barberan, Director of Translational Medicine Solutions at Elsevier, drug-drug interactions (DDIs) and ADRs occur at a high frequency, and are increasing as polypharmacy becomes more prevalent. “In Europe, more than 197,000 deaths each year are attributed to ADRs. And in the US, the FDA estimates that more than 106,000 people die every year from these events,” Barberan explains. “The DDIRC can be used by drug developers to predict interactions early on, when information on drug candidates is limited, and can also be used in later stages of development.”
The phase one version of the new DDIRC is set to be released in early 2020 and will include new workflows, novel ways to visualize data, and the ability to integrate companies’ drug and patient data. According to the team, DDIRC improves on the design of current calculators by employing a “mechanistic static” modeling calculator, which establishes the potential for metabolic DDIs between proprietary drugs in development as well as a panel of marketed drugs, using information from scientific literature as well as public regulatory filings from the FDA and EMA.
“The calculator will also be better able to assess the risk of DDI due to polypharmacy, and will deliver accurate, shareable and actionable insights,” Barberan said. “Any patient taking more than two drugs is vulnerable, but DDI is particularly prevalent in the elderly and special patient groups like renal- or liver-impaired populations.”
DDDIRC 2.0 – the final version of the calculator that will be available in 2021 – will include further improvements and a model for predicting transporter-mediated DDIs.
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