Physiologically based pharmacokinetic models: integration of in silico approaches with micro cell culture analogues

There is a large emphasis within the pharmaceutical industry to provide tools that will allow early research and development groups to better predict dose ranges for and metabolic responses of candidate molecules in a high throughput manner, prior to entering clinical trials. These tools incorporate approaches ranging from PBPK, QSAR, and molecular dynamics simulations in the in silico realm, to micro cell culture analogue (CCAs)s in the in vitro realm. This paper will serve to review these areas of high throughput predictive research, and highlight hurdles and potential solutions. In particular we will focus on CCAs, as their incorporation with PBPK modeling has the potential to replace animal testing, with a more predictive assay that can combine multiple organ analogs on one microfluidic platform in physiologically correct volume ratios. While several advantages arise from the current embodiments of CCAS in a microfluidic format that can be exploited for realistic simulations of drug absorption, metabolism and action, we explore some of the concerns with these systems, and provide a potential path forward to realizing animal-free solutions. Furthermore we envision that, together with theoretical modeling, CCAs may produce reliable predictions of the efficacy of newly developed drugs.