The development of biologics is a significant scientific advancement in medical sciences.. Biologics are therapeutic serums, viruses, toxins, antitoxins, blood products, components, allergenic products, or any other component that can be used to prevent, treat, or cure a disease or medical condition in human beings. Understanding the success and importance of biological drug development, numerous large pharmaceutical companies are acquiring and merging with biologics development platforms
Most biologics are complex and large and are not easily characterized or identified. Usually, biologics are produced from yeast, insects, bacteria, plants, or mammalian cells. However, biologics may induce immunogenicity due to the appearance of anti-drug antibody (ADA) complexes.
Hence, ADA services employes ADA antibody assay to evaluate the formation of anti-drug antibody complexes. However, the current article assesses PK/PD studies for biologics to understand unique considerations and approaches required in PK and PD clinical trials.
Considerations and Approaches for PK/PD studies of Biologics
Determining the PK/PD relationship is vital to understanding the association between drug exposure and its application in predicting PK/PD responses. This understanding can help determine optimal doses and therapeutic regimens for maximum therapeutic benefit.
A basic workflow of determining PK/PD of biologics through in vitro animal and human studies includes identifying safety, efficacy, PK and PD data from in vivo and in vitro studies, understanding PK/PD relationships, determining human PK, and finally incorporating PK data with safety and efficacy profile to determine and estimate first-in-human drug doses and subsequent safe doses in clinical trials.
Generally, small molecule drug dosing uses a fixed dosing approach in adult patients. However, in the case of biologic products, drug doses are often based on the patient’s body size. Whether the body surface area and body weight of a patient will affect the administered drug depends on the effect of body size on the PK/PD properties of the drug and its therapeutic window. An ideal dosing strategy will reduce interpretation variability and provide optimal therapeutic outcomes.
PK/PD responses are crucial for designing an optimizing dosing regimen. Several models, such as physiologically based models, mechanism-based models, semi-empirical models, empirical models, and meta-analyses, are available for evaluating similar molecular structures and targets of biological protein products. All these models can effectively assess different types of relationships, including exposure-response, exposure-biomarker, and biomarker-response relationships.
Out of these relationships, empirical exposure-exposure systems have become mainstream due to their convenient and practical applications. Other relationship models often depend on high-quality data, which depends on thoroughly designed studies and well-defined PK/PD parameters.
Meta-analysis is another promising modeling tool that is increasingly used to optimize the dosing regimen of biological protein products. Meta-analysis provides clinical data of biologic drug products from the same class and enriches the available information about the dose-exposure response of the candidate drug in development.
However, the limitations in identifying measurable biomarkers, the required data, and the inadequate understanding of the relationship between clinical response and pharmacodynamic response have been the limiting factors in applying PK/PD models in some clinical areas.
