Physiologically based pharmacokinetics and cancer risk assessment.

Physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) modeling involves mathematically describing the complex interplay of the critical physicochemical and biological determinants involved in the disposition of chemicals. In this approach, the body is divided into a number of biologically relevant tissue compartments, arranged in an anatomically accurate manner, and defined with appropriate physiological characteristics. The extrapolation of pharmacokinetic behavior of chemicals from high dose to low dose for various exposure routes and species is possible with this approach because these models are developed by integrating quantitative information on the critical determinants of chemical disposition under a biological modeling framework. The principal application of PBPK models is in the prediction of tissue dosimetry of toxic moiety (e.g., parent chemical, reactive metabolite, macromolecular adduct) of a chemical. Such an application has been demonstrated with dichloromethane, a liver and lung carcinogen in the B6C3F1 mouse. The PBPK model-based risk assessment approach estimated a cancer risk to people of 3.7 x 10(-8) for a lifetime inhalation exposure of 1 micrograms/m3, which is lower by more than two orders of magnitude than that calculated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency using the linearized multistage model (for low-dose extrapolation) and body surface correction factor (for interspecies scaling). The capability of predicting the target tissue exposure to toxic moiety in people with PBPK models should help reduce the uncertainty associated with the extrapolation procedures adopted in conventional dose-response assessment.