Explaining in-vitro to in-vivo efficacy correlations in oncology pre-clinical development via a semi-mechanistic mathematical model

In-vitro to in-vivo correlations (IVIVC), relating in-vitro parameters like IC50 to in-vivo drug exposure in plasma and tumour growth, are widely used in oncology for experimental design and dose decisions. However, they lack a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms. Our paper therefore focuses on linking empirical IVIVC relations for small-molecule kinase inhibitors with a semi-mechanistic tumour-growth model. We develop an approach incorporating parameters like the compound’s peak-trough ratio (PTR), Hill coefficient of in-vitro dose-response curves, and xenograft-specific properties. This leads to formulas for determining efficacious doses for tumor stasis under linear pharmacokinetics equivalent to traditional empirical IVIVC relations, but enabling more systematic analysis. Our findings reveal that in-vivo xenograft-specific parameters, specifically the growth rate (g) and decay rate (d), along with the average exposure, are generally more significant determinants of tumor stasis and effective dose than the compound’s peak-trough ratio. However, as the Hill coefficient increases, the dependency of tumor stasis on the PTR becomes more pronounced, indicating that the compound is more influenced by its maximum or trough values rather than the average exposure. Furthermore, we discuss the translation of our method to predict population dose ranges in clinical studies and propose a resistance mechanism that solely relies on specific in-vivo xenograft parameters instead of IC50 exposure coverage. In summary, our study aims to provide a more mechanistic understanding of IVIVC relations, emphasizing the importance of xenograft-specific parameters and PTR on tumor stasis.