Drug transporters (ABC) and solute carriers (SLC) are integral membrane proteins that move solutes across membranes, and for many drug substances these membrane proteins affect their absorption (A), distribution (D), metabolism (M) or excretion (E) properties.
The research group aims to understand the role of ABCs and SLCs in normal and pathophysiological situations – in the context of pharmaceutical science and ADME. Currently, one focus is to understand how pharmaceutical excipients and formulation approaches can be designed to increase the oral absorption of drug substances interacting with ABC transporters such as p-gp, MRP2, or BCRP. Another focus is to investigate the how changes in extracellular osmolarity alters expression and functions of membrane transporters in intestinal, renal and prostatic cell culture models – this research is aimed at identifying an unknown transporter of ibuprofen and to understand if SLCs are drug targets or drug delivery targets.
The research is centered around the use of cell cultures models to investigate ABCs and SLCs, and therefore we have cell lines from a variety of ADME relevant tissues; cancer cells, transporter transfected cell lines or cell lines engineered in other manners.