Comparative in Vitro Studies of the Metabolism of Six 4-Substituted Methamphetamines and Their Inhibition of

Copyright © 2013 Masashi Taniguchi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution Licen-se, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Use of new amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS) as designer drugs is a serious problem worldwide. ATS are used in tablet, capsule, and powder forms, and can be mixed with other drugs. There is little information available on how these new drugs are metabolized or their ability to inhibit the metabolism of co-administered drugs. This study aimed to in-vestigate the metabolism of six 4-substituted analogs of methamphetamine (MA), and their potential inhibition of MA metabolism. The metabolism of MA and the 4-substituted MAs was examined in vitro using human metabolic enzymes. Metabolite analyses were performed using trifluoroacetyl derivatization and GC-MS. The experiments showed that cy-tochrome P450 2D6 (CYP2D6) was involved in the major metabolic pathway of MA, where it catalyzed N-demethyla-tion of 4-fluoromethamphetamine (4-FMA), 4-chloromethamphetamine (4-CMA), 4-bromomethamphetamine (4-BMA), 4-iodomethamphetamine (4-IMA) and 4-nitromethamphetamine (4-NMA), and O-demethylation of 4-methoxyme-thamphetamine (4-MMA). The half maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50) values for CYP2D6 using MA as substrate were different for each of the 4-substituted MAs. The strongest inhibitors of amphetamine production from MA were, in order, 4-IMA, 4-BMA, 4-CMA, 4-MMA, 4-FMA, and 4-NMA. The same order was observed for the IC50 values for in