Target-Mediated Brain Tissue Binding for Small Molecule Inhibitors of Heat Shock Protein 90

Drug distribution in the brain is generally associated with an affinity for fatty brain tissues and therefore known to be species- and concentration-independent. We report here the effect of target affinity on brain tissue binding for 10 small molecules designed to inhibit brain heat shock protein 90 (HSP90), a widespread protein whose expression is 1-2% of total cytosolic proteins in eucaryotes. Our results show that increasing the test item concentrations from 0.3 to 100 µM increased the unbound fraction 32-fold for the most potent molecules, with no change for the inactive one (1.1 fold change). Saturation of HSP90 led to normal concentration-independent brain tissue binding. In vivo pharmacokinetics performed in rats showed that the overall volume of distribution of compounds is correlated with their affinity for HSP90. The in vitro binding and in vivo pharmacokinetics (PK) performed in rats showed that small molecule HSP90 inhibitors followed the principle of target-mediated drug disposition. We demonstrate that assessing unbound fractions in brain homogenate was subject to HSP90 target interference; this may challenge the process of linking systemic-free drug concentrations to central nervous system unbound concentrations necessary to establish the proper pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics (PK/PD) relation needed for human dose prediction.