The antihypertensive felodipine is a calcium channel blocker of the dihydropyridine type, and its pharmacodynamic effect directly correlates with its plasma concentration. As a sensitive substrate of cytochrome P450 (CYP) 3A4 with high first-pass metabolism, felodipine shows low oral bioavailability and is susceptible to drug-drug interactions (DDIs) with CYP3A4 perpetrators. This study aimed to develop a physiologically based pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PBPK/PD) parent-metabolite model of felodipine and its metabolite dehydrofelodipine for DDI predictions. The model was developed in PK-Sim® and MoBi® using 49 clinical studies (94 plasma concentration-time profiles in total) that investigated different doses (1-40 mg) of the intravenous and oral administration of felodipine. The final model describes the metabolism of felodipine to dehydrofelodipine by CYP3A4, sufficiently capturing the first-pass metabolism and the subsequent metabolism of dehydrofelodipine by CYP3A4. Diastolic blood pressure and heart rate PD models were included, using an Emax function to describe the felodipine concentration-effect relationship. The model was tested in DDI predictions with itraconazole, erythromycin, carbamazepine, and phenytoin as CYP3A4 perpetrators, with all predicted DDI AUClast and Cmax ratios within two-fold of the observed values. The model will be freely available in the Open Systems Pharmacology model repository and can be applied in DDI predictions as a CYP3A4 victim drug.
Keywords: cytochrome P450 3A4 (CYP3A4); drug–drug interactions (DDIs); felodipine; pharmacodynamics; physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) modeling.