ABSTRACT:We previously reported that hepatobiliary transporter multidrug resistance-associated protein (MRP2/Mrp2) is considered to be the major cause of the interspecies differences detected by efflux of fluorescent substrates in isolated hepatocytes. In the present study, the interspecies differences of MRP2/Mrp2 were first evaluated by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction and Western blotting. The mRNA levels were able to distinguish the difference among species with a rank order comparable with the corresponding activities observed, whereas the extents of the differences remained unknown. The cross-reactions of MRP2/Mrp2 protein of different species with anti-human MRP2 polyclonal antibody were found by Western blotting. However, because of the unknown binding affinity of antibody to MRP2/Mrp2 protein across species and lack of purified MRP2/Mrp2 proteins for calibration, the immunoblotting assay was excluded from the absolute quantification of MRP2/Mrp2 protein for multiple species. By using our newly developed liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry quantification method, we were able to measure the absolute amount of MRP2/Mrp2 in liver tissues and isolated hepatocytes across species. Freshly isolated hepatocytes conserved MRP2/ Mrp2 protein levels that are comparable with those in the liver tissues. The amount of Mrp2 in rat liver was approximately 10-fold higher than that in other species. Moreover, a significant loss of Mrp2 protein in the membrane fraction of rat cryopreserved hepatocytes was observed. Thus, the absolute differences of MRP2/ Mrp2 levels in various species were determined, for the first time, by direct quantification. The results could potentially fill the translational gaps of in vitro/in vivo or preclinical species to human extrapolation of hepatobiliary elimination mediated by MRP2/ Mrp2.Xenobiotics and their metabolites are generally eliminated and detoxified by phase I and phase II enzymatic metabolism, by phase III transporter-mediated drug efflux to bile, or by both mechanisms. The excretion of drugs by hepatocytes into bile is one of the primary elimination routes for xenobiotics and the conjugate metabolites (Arias et al., 1993). In each stage of drug discovery, accurate prediction of human pharmacokinetics for a potential drug candidate is of great value (Mahmood, 1999). Even though the interspecies scaling methods based on physiologically allometric procedures have been successfully applied, particularly into extrapolation of hepatic enzymatic metabolism and urinary excretion (Dedrick et al., 1970;Iwatsubo et al., 1997;Ito et al., 1998), the in vitro or in vivo model for biliary excretion predication is far from being mature (Mahmood and Sahajwalla, 2002). The remarkable interspecies differences in biliary excretion of xenobiotics and drugs/metabolites (Ishizuka et al., 1999;Shilling et al., 2006) may cause significant overestimation of biliary excretion in humans simply by an exponential allometric extrapolation approach (Lave et al., 1999;Pahlman et al., ...