Virtual screening of intestinal drug permeability

Lead compounds generated in high throughput drug discovery programmes often have unfavorable biopharmaceutical properties, resulting in a low success rate of such drug candidates in clinical development. Drug companies and researchers would thus like to have methods of predicting biopharmaceutical properties accurately. The intestinal permeability to a lead compound is one such property which is particularly important. Therefore, access to methods to accurately predict biopharmaceutical properties, such as the intestinal permeability of a large series of compounds, is of particular importance. This review deals with new theoretical methods used to predict intestinal drug permeability. There are several possible transport routes across the intestine, but theoretical methods generally deal with only one of them, the passive transcellular route. Therefore, this review will also discuss the relative importance of passive and active drug transport and efflux routes using recent data generated in cell cultures, animal models and human subjects.