Current Progress Toward a Better Understanding of Drug Disposition Within the Lungs: Summary Proceedings of the First Workshop on Drug Transporters in the Lungs

The School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at Trinity College Dublin hosted the “1st Workshop on Drug Transporters in the Lungs” in September 2016 to discuss the impact of transporters on pulmonary drug disposition and their roles as drug targets in lung disease. The workshop brought together about 30 scientists from academia and pharmaceutical industry from Europe and Japan and addressed the primary questions: What do we know today, and what do we need to know tomorrow about transporters in the lung? The 3 themes of the workshop were: (1) techniques to study drug transporter expression and actions in the lungs; (2) drug transporter effects on pulmonary pharmacokinetics-case studies; and (3) transporters as drug targets in lung disease. Some of the conclusions of the workshop were: suitable experimental models that allow studies of transporter effects are available; data from these models convincingly show a contribution of both uptake and efflux transporters on pulmonary drug disposition; the effects of transporters on drug lung PK is now better conceptualized; some transporters are associated with lung diseases. However, more work is needed to establish which of the available models best translate to the clinical situation.