Purpose: Cancer patients experience pain during medical treatment. Therefore, anticancer drugs and painkillers are often prescribed together. This study aims to determine the interaction between anlotinib and oxycodone and reveal the underlying mechanism.
Methods: UPLC-MS/MS, an efficient and sensitive method, was used for the simultaneous determination of oxycodone and oxycodone metabolites. Sprague-Dawley rats were given oxycodone with or without anlotinib. Then, UPLC-MS/MS was used to determine the blood concentration of oxycodone. To study the interaction mechanism, rat and human liver microsomes (HLMs) were used for determining enzyme kinetics.
Results: Long-term administration of oxycodone combined with anlotinib resulted in significantly increased pharmacokinetic parameters AUC(0-t), AUC(0-∞), and Cmax for oxycodone, indicating that anlotinib inhibited oxycodone. In vitro kinetic measurements indicated that anlotinib inhibited the metabolism of oxycodone through a mixed mechanism. Further studies indicated that in HLMs, anlotinib strongly inhibited the metabolism of oxycodone.
Conclusion: This study showed that anlotinib inhibited the metabolism of oxycodone both in vitro and in vivo. It is recommended that the dose of oxycodone should be reconsidered when oxycodone is combined with anlotinib in clinical practice.
Keywords: Anlotinib; Interaction; Oxycodone; UPLC-MS/MS.
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