ABSTRACT:Little information regarding the metabolic pathways of pharmaceutical agents administered to dogs, or the inhibition of those metabolic pathways, is available. Without this information, it is difficult to assess how combinations of drugs, whether new or old or approved or nonapproved, may increase the risk for metabolic drug-drug interactions in dogs. Because mammalian xenobiotic metabolism pathways often involve the hepatic cytochrome P450 (P450) monooxgenases, canine liver microsome P450 inhibition screens were tested to evaluate the potential metabolic drug interaction risk of commonly used veterinary medicines. A probe substrate cocktail was developed for four of the five major hepatic canine P450s and used to evaluate their inhibition by 45 canine therapeutic agents in a single-point IC 50 screen. Moderate inhibitors (>25%) were further characterized with an automated ninepoint IC 50 assay that identified ketoconazole, clomipramine, and loperamide as submicromolar CYP2D15 inhibitors. Additional inhibitors belonged to the antiemetic, antimitotic, and anxiolytic therapeutic classes. According to the marker activities, the relative frequency of P450 inhibition by isoform followed the sequence CYP2D15 > CYP2B11 > CYP2C21/41 > CYP3A12/26 > CYP1A1/2. The findings presented suggest there is some overlap in canine and human P450 inhibition specificity. However, occasional differences may give human drugs used off-label in dogs unexpected P450 inhibition profiles and, therefore, cause an unexpected drugdrug interaction risk.The number of reports describing the basic enzymology of drugmetabolizing enzymes in nonhuman species has increased the last decade. Notable examples include the characterization of several homologs of the major human xenobiotic-metabolizing cytochromes P450 that were cloned from canine hepatocytes (Roussel et al., 1998;Shou et al., 2003). Single nucleotide polymorphisms within canine P450s that alter activity have also been identified, as have P450 isoforms that appear to only be expressed in a fraction of the beagle population (Sakamoto et al., 1995;Blaisdell et al., 1998). More recently, three hepatic feline P450s cDNAs were characterized, two of which were expressed and characterized (Tanaka et al., 2005(Tanaka et al., , 2006. Whereas some of these reports bring a better understanding of when metabolism in preclinical species may or may not reflect the human situation (Martignoni et al., 2006;Turpeinen et al., 2007), there have been few reports on how specific P450s are inhibited by or metabolize pharmaceuticals used in the animal health field.For instance, in the development of new therapies for dogs, prediction of whether concomitant medications in the patient population may inhibit metabolic clearance pathways would be helpful in the assessment of the metabolic drug-drug interaction (DDI) potential. However, there is a lack of canine P450 inhibition data and understanding of basic canine enzymology that has caused in vitro canine drug interaction assessment to lag behind that of h...