ABSTRACT:Enzyme kinetics of GTI-2040 (5-GGC TAA ATC GCT CCA CCA AG-3), a phosphorothioate ribonucleotide reductase antisense, were investigated for the first time in 3 exonuclease solution and human liver microsomes (HLMs), using the ion-pair high-performance liquid chromatogram method for quantification of the parent drug and two major 3N-1 and 3N-2 metabolites. Enzyme kinetics of GTI-2040 in 3-exonuclease solution were found to be well characterized by the Michaelis-Menten model, using the sum of formation rates of 3N-1 and 3N-2 (ϳtotal metabolism) because of sequential metabolism. In HLMs, a biphasic binding was observed for GTI-2040 with high-and low-affinity constants (K d s) of 0.03 and 3.8 M, respectively. Enzyme kinetics of GTI-2040 in HLMs were found to deviate from Michaelis-Menten kinetics when the total GTI-2040 substrate was used. However, after correction for the unbound fractions, the formation rate of total metabolites could be described by Michaelis-Menten kinetics. Using the free substrate fraction, the K m and V max of GTI-2040 were determined to be 6.33 ؎ 3.2 M and 16.5 ؎ 8.4 nmol/mg/h, respectively. Using these values, in vitro hepatic intrinsic clearance (CL int ) in HLM was estimated to be 2.61 ؎ 0.56 ml/h. The CL int was then used to predict GTI-2040's in vivo intrinsic clearance in humans by a microsomal protein scaling factor, which gave a mean value of 182.7 l/h, representing 24.1% of the observed in vivo mean scaled hepatic intrinsic clearance of 758.7 l/h in patients with acute myeloid leukemia. We concluded that the saturable nonspecific binding of GTI-2040 in HLMs complicated the interpretation of its enzyme kinetics, and scaled intrinsic clearance from HLMs only partially predicted the in vivo intrinsic clearance.Antisense oligonucleotides (ODNs) are short, single-strand DNA molecules designed to hybridize with specific mRNA strands, thereby selectively inhibiting the production of specific gene products (Stein and Cheng, 1993;Dias and Stein, 2002). This approach has been explored to target expression of genes important for malignant transformation and other pathogenetic mechanisms. For a successful therapeutic use of ODN compounds robust in vivo, stability is critical. Previously used unmodified ODNs degraded rapidly in biological fluids by nucleases, which limited their clinical use. More recently, by substituting one of the nonbridge oxygen atoms, phosphorothioate analogs have been synthesized and shown to be more resistant to exonucleases than the unmodified ODNs Aboul-Fadl, 2005). Several phosphorothioate ODNs (PS-ODNs) are currently undergoing clinical evaluation for a number of diseases, including cancer, viral infections, and inflammatory disorders Jansen and Zangemeister-Wittke, 2002;Marcucci et al., 2005). It has been reported that the in vivo pharmacodynamic effects of antisense correlate with the intracellular drug levels and clinical response Dai et al., 2005a;Marcucci et al., 2005). Moreover, it is anticipated that a well defined pharmacokinetics-pharmacodynamics cor...