The oral absorption of drugs and drug candidates often varies, when they are administered after food intake.1-4) The effect of food on oral drug absorption may alter the effectiveness of drug therapy. Thus, dosing instructions should be carefully set on the basis of the characteristics of drug absorption in order to ensure a high level of effectiveness in drug therapy. The oral drug absorption under the fed state can be more or less than that under the fasted state, which are often called positive and negative food effects, respectively. [5][6][7][8] Fleisher et al. stated that drugs classified into class I, class II and class III using the biopharmaceutics classification system (BCS) are likely to be not affected by food, be positively affected by food and be negatively affected by food, respectively, while the effects are unclear for class IV drugs.
9)As the main cause of the positive food effect, it is considered that the ingestion of food stimulates the secretion of bile juice into the gastrointestinal tract, which accelerates the solubility and dissolution of poorly water-soluble drugs and then enhances oral absorption. [10][11][12] The oral absorption of drugs with high lipophilicity was affected by the food state, which is shown in Table 1. For instance, the oral absorption of albendazole was enhanced 4-fold by the intake of food. However, the total absorbed amount of nateglinide was the almost same between the fasted and fed states because the intake of food did not enhance area under curve (AUC) but induced a decreased absorption rate (decreased C max and prolonged T max ).13) Moreover, the oral absorption of poorly water-soluble drugs is often proportionally reduced with increasing dose strength owing to solubility-and dissolution rate-limited absorption.14,15) Thus, these effects on drug absorption should be considered when the oral absorption of poorly water-soluble drugs is predicted.Gu et al. proposed a statistical model for prediction of the effect of food on drug absorption.16) The maximum absorbable dose (MAD) of 92 drugs was calculated using solubility, fluid volume (250 ml), transit time (180 min) and absorption rate constant (min
Ϫ1). Then, the effect of food on drug absorption was predicted by comparing MAD with clinical dose and using logistic regression with physicochemical properties. For the 92 drugs, 80% were correctly categorized into positive, negative or no effect of food groups in the prediction. In the case of a positive effect of food, 83% were successfully classified. Although the adapted method is useful for the qualitative prediction of the effect of food on drug absorption, it may not be suitable for its quantitative prediction.In previous studies, we developed an in vitro system (Dissolution/Permeation system: D/P system, Fig. 1) to evaluate the dissolution and permeation of drugs in solid dosage form.17) The D/P system enables simultaneous determination of drug dissolution and permeation after a drug is applied to the apical side of the system. The applied amount of drugs wa...