If a drug deemed ‘safe’ in nonclinical tests subsequently prolongs QT in phase 1 studies, how can its sponsor convince regulators to allow development to proceed?

A case-control study on the clinical characteristics of granisetron-related arrhythmias and the development of a predictive nomogram

BACKGROUND

Automatic monitoring and assessment are increasingly employed in drug safety evaluations using hospital information system data. The increasing concern about granisetron-related arrhythmias requires real-world studies to improve our understanding of its safety.

AIM

This study aimed to analyze the incidence, clinical characteristics, and risk factors of granisetron-related arrhythmias in hospitalized patients using real-world data obtained from the Adverse Drug Event Active Surveillance and Assessment System-II (ADE-ASAS-II) and concurrently aimed to develop and validate a nomogram to predict the occurrence of arrhythmias.

METHOD

Retrospective automatic monitoring of inpatients using granisetron was conducted in a Chinese hospital from January 1, 2017, to December 31, 2021, to determine the incidence of arrhythmias using ADE-ASAS- II. Propensity score matching was used to balance confounders and analyze clinical characteristics. Based on risk factors identified through logistic regression analysis, a prediction nomogram was established and internally validated using the Bootstrap method.

RESULTS

Arrhythmias occurred in 178 of 72,508 cases taking granisetron with an incidence of 0.3%. Independent risk factors for granisetron-related arrhythmias included medication duration, comorbid cardiovascular disease, concomitant use of other 5-hydroxytryptamine 3 receptor antagonists, alanine aminotransferase > 40 U/L, and blood urea nitrogen > 7.5 mmol/L. The nomogram demonstrated good differentiation and calibration, with enhanced clinical benefit observed when the risk threshold ranged from 0.10 to 0.82.

CONCLUSION

The nomogram, based on the five identified independent risk factors, may be valuable in predicting the risk of granisetron-related arrhythmias in the administered population, offering significant clinical applications.

Prolonged QTc interval in cancer therapeutic drug development: defining arrhythmic risk in malignancy

Anticancer therapy drug development is an arduous task, taking 10 to 15 years to complete, requiring approximately 1 billion dollars, and rarely leads to Food and Drug Administration approval. Methods to predict unacceptable drug-induced toxicity, such as a prolonged QTc interval/risk of torsade de pointes, should be highly informative to quickly and accurately determine if further resources should be allocated in the continued development of an agent. Expert consensus has established guidelines to ascertain the ability of a new drug to prolong the QTc interval. Although QTc measurement is the best way to assess arrhythmic risk, it is imprecise for a variety of reasons. In addition, oncology patients have multiple risk factors for QTc prolongation at baseline. Competing interests involved in assessing arrhythmic risk of a new oncology agent include inability to precisely follow published guidelines for QTc assessment, patients' concomitant medical problems interfering with drug assessment and therefore clinical trial enrollment, patient safety concerns, general public safety concerns regarding toxicity assessment, need for discovery of more curative drug therapies, and individual patient perception of therapeutic risk vs benefit. Oncology patients are concerned about access to experimental agents, as well as early abandonment of a potentially beneficial agent because of a low estimated risk of toxicity, even if the event is catastrophic. We review the issues involved in evaluating the QTc interval-prolonging risk in new anticancer agents.

CPU228, a derivative of dofetilide, relieves cardiac dysfunction by normalizing FKBP12.6, NADPH oxidase and protein kinase C ε in the myocardium

Objectives

The aim of this study was to determine if CPU228, a derivative of dofetilide, is more effective than dofetilide in attenuating isoproterenol-induced heart failure by recovering downregulated FK506 binding protein (FKBP12.6), and suppressing oxidative stress, upregulated NADPH oxidase and protein kinase C ε (PKCε) hyperphosphorylation in the myocardium.

Methods

Heart failure was induced by isoproterenol (1 mg/kg s.c. for 5 days) in male Sprague-Dawley rats. Intervention with either CPU228 or dofetilide (2 mg/kg on Days 3–5) was then conducted in vivo and in vitro.

Key findings

Isoproterenol produced compromised left ventricular systolic pressure, left ventricular pressure rise (dp/dtmax) and fall (dp/dtmin), and left ventricular end-diastolic pressure, associated with oxidative stress, abnormal FKBP12.6, NADPH oxidase p67phox and PKCε in the myocardium. CPU228 was more effective in attenuating these changes than dofetilide in vivo. Dofetilide produced a prolonged QTc to replace a shortened one. In primary neonatal cardiomyocytes, cultured with isoproterenol and treated with either CPU228 or dofetilide at 10−8, 10−7 and 10−6 mol/l, isoproterenol produced a hyperadrenergic state characterized by downregulated FKBP12.6, upregulated NADPH oxidase p67phox and PKCε in vitro. CPU228 was more effective than dofetilide in recovering these changes in a dose-dependent manner without a prolonged QTc.

Conclusions

CPU228 was more effective than dofetilide in attenuating heart failure by normalizing isoproterenol-induced changes, including downregulation of FKBP12.6, upregulation of NADPH oxidase and PKCε hyperphosphorylation in vivo and in vitro.

Update on the evaluation of a new drug for effects on cardiac repolarization in humans: issues in early drug development

Following reports of death from cardiac arrhythmias with drugs like terfenadine and cisapride, the International Conference for Harmonization formulated a guidance (E14) document. This specifies that all new drugs must undergo a 'thorough QT/QTc' (TQT) study to detect drug-induced QT prolongation, a surrogate marker of ventricular tachycardia, especially torsades de pointes (TdPs). With better understanding of data from several completed TQT studies, regulatory requirements have undergone some changes since the E14 guidance was implemented in October 2005. This article reviews the implications of the E14 guidance and the changes in its interpretation including choice of baseline QT, demonstration of assay sensitivity, statistical analysis of the effect of new drug and positive control, and PK-PD modelling. Some issues like use of automated QT measurements remain unresolved. Pharmaceutical companies too are modifying Phase 1 studies to detect QTc liability early in order to save time and resources. After the E14 guidance, development of several drugs that prolong QTc by >5 ms is being abandoned by sponsors. However, all drugs that prolong the QT interval do not increase risk of TdP. Researchers in regulatory agencies, academia and industry are working to find better biomarkers of drug-induced TdP which could prevent many useful drugs from being prematurely abandoned. Drug-induced TdP is a rare occurrence. With fewer drugs that prolong QT interval reaching the licensing stage, knowing which of these drugs are torsadogenic is proving to be elusive. Thus, paradoxically, the effectiveness of the E14 guidance itself has made prospective validation of new biomarkers difficult.

Principles of safety pharmacology

Safety Pharmacology is a rapidly developing discipline that uses the basic principles of pharmacology in a regulatory-driven process to generate data to inform risk/benefit assessment. The aim of Safety Pharmacology is to characterize the pharmacodynamic/pharmacokinetic (PK/PD) relationship of a drug's adverse effects using continuously evolving methodology. Unlike toxicology, Safety Pharmacology includes within its remit a regulatory requirement to predict the risk of rare lethal events. This gives Safety Pharmacology its unique character. The key issues for Safety Pharmacology are detection of an adverse effect liability, projection of the data into safety margin calculation and finally clinical safety monitoring. This article sets out to explain the drivers for Safety Pharmacology so that the wider pharmacology community is better placed to understand the discipline. It concludes with a summary of principles that may help inform future resolution of unmet needs (especially establishing model validation for accurate risk assessment). Subsequent articles in this issue of the journal address specific aspects of Safety Pharmacology to explore the issues of model choice, the burden of proof and to highlight areas of intensive activity (such as testing for drug-induced rare event liability, and the challenge of testing the safety of so-called biologics (antibodies, gene therapy and so on.).