US Patent 7097967 Method of predicting drug-food interaction

The present invention provides a method of predicting a food-drug interaction in vivo, in the case of an orally administered drug interactive with digestive enzymes in the gastrointestinal tract, by measuring the activity of the drug to the digestive enzymes in vitro, which is based on the fact that the ingestion of foods causes the absorption of drug in vivo to decrease due to the above interaction between a drug and digestive enzymes. The present invention further provides methods of minimizing the change of absorption in vivo caused by the ingestion of foods by reducing the action of digestive enzymes, for example, introduction of prodrugs, modification of the chemical structure of drug, design of drug formulation, etc.