UCSF

The Food and Drug Administration recommends rosuvastatin dosage reductions in Asian patients because pharmacokinetic studies have demonstrated an approximate 2-fold increase in median exposure to rosuvastatin in Asian subjects compared with Caucasian controls. Yet, no explanation for this ethnic difference has been confirmed. Here we show that rosuvastatin exposure in Asians and Whites does not differ significantly when all subjects are wild-type carriers for both solute carrier organic anion transporter 1B1 *1a and ATP-binding cassette subfamily G member 2 c.421 transporters in a 2-arm, randomized, cross-over rosuvastatin pharmacokinetics study in healthy white and Asian volunteers. For single rosuvastatin doses, AUC_0-48 were 92.5 (±36.2) and 83.5 (±32.2) ng/mL × h and C_max were 10.0 (±4.1) and 7.6 (±3.0) ng/mL for Asians and Whites, respectively. When transporters were inhibited by intravenous rifampin, rosuvastatin AUC_0-48 and C_max also showed no ethnic differences. Our study suggests that both SLCO1B1 and ABCG2 polymorphisms are better predictors of rosuvastatin exposure than ethnicity alone and could be considered in precision medicine dosing of rosuvastatin.