Pharmacokinetic Behavior of L-Asparaginase in Men and in Animals

Abstract

In modern therapeutic research it is a generally accepted that the knowledge of the qualitative and quantitative effects of a new drug is not sufficient for its characterization, but that as much as possible should be known about its fate in the body — i. e. absorption, blood levels, distribution, elimination, and biotransformation. In the case of Crasnitin ¹ this is of special importance because therapy with enzymes is a rather new field of modern medicine, and the experience gained with other drugs may well be worthless with respect to asparaginase (Asnase) therapy. For this reason we made some efforts — like several other investigators [2, 3, 6, 7, 8] — to explore the fate of Asnase in the body, and I shall show in this paper that in our experiments Asnase has indeed some pharmacokinetic properties by which it differs considerably from other drugs.