by Wattanakul T, Chotsiri P, Scandale I, Hoglund RM, Tarning J. Expert Review of Clinical Pharmacology 2022;15(8): 945-958. doi: 10.1080/17512433.2022.2113388
Summary: Drug repurposing of already available marketed compounds could substantially reduce cost and time required to deliver treatments to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. However, many drug candidates show efficacy in vitro, but fail when evaluated in clinical trials. Better approaches to evaluating in vitro data are needed, in order to prioritize drugs for repurposing. The authors used a pharmacometric simulation-based approach to evaluate the in vitro activity data of potential drugs, together with their expected exposure in human, to evaluate the likelihood of achieving effective concentrations in patients. This pharmacometric approach could be a useful compliment to other methods for prioritizing repurposed drugs for evaluation in prospective randomized controlled clinical trials.