Drug absorption through a cell monolayer: a theoretical work on a non-linear three-compartment model.

The subject of analysis is a non-linear three-compartment model, widely used in pharmacological absorption studies. It has been transformed into a general form, thus leading automatically to an appropriate approximation. This made the absorption profile accessible and expressions for absorption times, apparent permeabilities and equilibrium values were given. These findings allowed a profound analysis of results from non-linear curve fits and delivered the dependencies on the systems' parameters over a wide range of values. The results were applied to an absorption experiment with multidrug transporter-affected antibiotic CNV97100 on Caco-2 cell monolayers.