Tyrosine kinase inhibitors have recently become an essential tool in management of chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML). Dasatinib, a representative of those drugs, acts by inhibiting key proteins included in CML development, predominantly Bcr-Abl and Src. Its advantage is that it shows activity in many cases where other agents bring no improvement due to resistance. Pharmacokinetics of dasatinib has specific characteristics that may play an important role in achieving sufficient exposure in patients. Therefore, the key pharmacokinetic properties are summarized in this report. For example, dasatinib absorption is significantly influenced by gastric pH and its modulation can be a source of serious interactions, as well as simultaneous administration of drugs affecting cytochrome P450.

One of the major concerns for all in vivo experiments is intra- and inter-subject variability, which can be a great source of inaccuracy. The aim of this study is, therefore, to estimate the ability of parallel vs. cross-over design studies in order to describe the relative pharmacokinetic performance of the studied drug formulations. We analyzed the data from a drug development program that examined the performance of innovative abiraterone acetate formulations against the identical reference product in three stages. In stages 1–3, groups A–F were dosed with the reference product once in a parallel manner. Stage 4 was performed to evaluate the intra-individual variability (IIV) by repeated administration of the reference product to the same animals. Although the geometric mean (90% CI) values of abiraterone AUC_last in groups A–F were similar to the IIV group (24.36 (23.79–41.00) vs. 26.29 (20.56–47.00) mg/mL·min·g), the results generated in the isolated parallel groups provided imprecise estimates of the true AUC_last values ranging from 9.62 to 44.62 mg/mL·min·g due to chance. Notably, in 4 out of 15 possible pair comparisons between the parallel groups, the confidence intervals did not include 100%, which is the true ratio for all comparisons tested after identical formulation administration to all groups. A cross-over design can significantly improve the methodology in short-term comparative pre-clinical pharmacokinetic studies, and can provide more precise and accurate results in comparison to more traditional pre-clinical study designs.