Population pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of prasugrel and clopidogrel in aspirin-treated patients with stable coronary artery disease

The aim of the current analysis was to characterize the population PK of prasugrel and clopidogrel metabolites, the resulting PD response, and identification of covariates for key PK/PD parameters. Aspirin-treated subjects with coronary artery disease were randomized to double-blind treatment with clopidogrel 600 mg loading dose (LD) followed by daily 75 mg maintenance dose (MD) or prasugrel 60 mg LD and daily 10 mg MD for 28 days. Plasma concentrations of prasugrel active metabolite (Pras-AM) and prasugrel's inactive thiolactone metabolite (Pras-thiolactone) were simultaneously fit to a multicompartmental model; a similar model adequately described clopidogrel's active metabolite (Clop-AM) PK. By linking to the PK model through the active metabolite concentrations, the PK/PD model characterized the irreversible inhibition of platelet aggregation through a sigmoidal Emax model. Although dose, sex, and weight were identified as significant covariates in the prasugrel PK model, only the effect of body weight produced significant changes in Pras-AM exposure. Generally, these factors resulted in only minor changes in Pras-AM exposures such that, overall, the change in the resulting maximal platelet aggregation (MPA) was predicted to be a parts per thousand currency sign10% points on average. The clopidogrel PK model included dose as a covariate indicating that a significantly less-than-proportional increase in Clop-AM exposure is expected over the dose range of 75-600 mg, thus, the model-predicted PD response is lower than might be anticipated given an 8-fold difference in dose and lower than that typically achieved following prasugrel 60 mg LD. The greater PD response with prasugrel compared with clopidogrel was accounted for by greater conversion of dose to active metabolite.