CORRELATION APPROACH OF PRO-DRUG AND CO-DRUG IN BIOTRANSFORMATION

Pruthvi Akhani, Aditya Thakkar, Hemant Shah, Ruchang Shah, Vikas Patel and Prof. Dr. Dhrubo Jyoti Sen*

ABSTRACT

Prodrug is a substance which after administration is metabolized into a pharmacologically active drug. Actually Prodrug has least medicinal value in in-vitro/in-vivo but after biotransformation by metabolism in in-vivo it releases the active medicament. A drug is a substance which is a chemical entity, has definite structural skeleton, obtained by natural or synthetic or semisynthetic source, which can fit on bioreceptor platform having controlling capacity to control over the biochemical malfunction. Every drug is xenobiotic because it is coming from outer source (xeno) and active in biological unit (biotic). Prodrug is the precursor of drug which is made by derivatization of the same to enhance the bioavailability by pharmacokinetics, lipid solubility by partition coefficient and increase the physicochemical & biochemical parameters by pharmacodynamics. Prodrug is a precursor (forerunner) of a drug. A prodrug must undergo chemical conversion by metabolic processes before becoming an active pharmacological agent. For example, sulfasalazine is a prodrug. It is not active in its ingested form. It has to be broken down by bacteria in the colon into two products: 5-aminosalicylic acid (5ASA) and sulfapyridine; before becoming active as a drug. It is a compound that, on administration, must undergo chemical conversion by metabolic processes before becoming an active pharmacological agent; a precursor of a drug. It is called as biotransformation which produce active drug for pharmacological response from prodrug which is inactive.

Keywords: Pro-drug, Co-drug, Biotransformation, ADME, Xenobiotic, Receptor, Pharmacodynamics, Pharmacokinetics, DEPT, ADEPT, GDEPT, VDEPT, PDEPT, CDEPT.