Practical experience of using human microdosing with AMS analysis to obtain early human drug metabolism and PK data

The background to human microdosing or Phase 0 studies is reviewed, focusing particularly on the information that such studies can provide in the context of exploratory clinical development. Examples are provided of the microdose-validation studies known as the Consortium for Resourcing and Evaluating AMS Microdosing trial and EU Microdosing AMS Partnership Programme, which demonstrated that there was good dose proportionality between microdose and pharmacological dose pharmacokinetics. When microdosing was applied to ten development drugs, it was found that all ten molecules showed dose proportionality between the microdose and the pharmacological dose. The majority of microdose studies have used accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) analysis and only these studies that are considered here; AMS provides information on all metabolites, even if these are minor. There is now sufficient scientific data to justify microdose studies being routinely conducted as part of the drug-development process.