Researchers from MIT, Duke University, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have designed an innovative strategy to identify the specific transporters that different drugs utilize. The study could potentially improve patient treatment as it uncovered that certain common drugs can interfere with each other if they rely on the same transporter. The process is based upon utilizing tissue models and machine learning algorithms, with the early testing demonstrating that a popular blood thinner and antibiotic can clash.
Determining the specific transporters used by varying drugs could boost the efficacy of drug development by making new medicines more absorbent. This process could be achieved by including excipients that enhance the drug’s interaction with the transporters.
For years, scientists studied the transporters present within the GI tract that assist drugs in passing through the intestinal lining. The new process, developed by the researchers, is based on a model that they had designed back in 2020 to measure a drug’s absorbability. The model involves pig intestinal tissue grown in the lab, which can then be exposed to different medicinal formulations so that the absorption levels can be measured.
In this research process, 23 commonly used drugs were tested, allowing the identification of the transporters employed by each drug. Afterward, a machine learning model was trained using this data and additional data procured from drug databases. This approach resulted in almost 2 million predictions of potential drug interactions.
To validate the predictions, data from approximately 50 patients, who had been taking one of such medicines when prescribed with doxycycline, was analyzed. The results confirmed that when doxycycline and warfarin (a commonly prescribed blood thinner) were taken together, the level of warfarin increased, and then dropped again after the patient stopped taking doxycycline.
Crucially, this process can be applied to medicines currently under development, enabling the developers to adjust the formulation of the drug to prevent interactions with other drugs or enhance their absorbability. A biotech company named Vivtex, co-founded by ex-MIT postdoc Thomas von Erlach, MIT Institute Professor Robert Langer, and Traverso, is now looking into such drug tuning.
The study is funded in part by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the Mechanical Engineering Department at MIT, and the Gastroenterology Division at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and is a foundational step in enhancing the safety and efficacy of drug delivery and treatment.
