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. 2014 Oct 31;5:231. doi: 10.3389/fphar.2014.00231

Figure 5.

Figure 5

A typical biomembrane drawn roughly to scale, indicating the typical protein:lipid mass ratio and the possible means by which a small molecule drug (atorvastatin, also drawn to scale) might cross, including (A) bilayer lipoidal diffusion through bilayer areas nominally unaffected by the presence of proteins, or (B) by hitchhiking a lift on transporters (Schlessinger et al., 2013b) normally present for the purposes of intermediary metabolism. At issue is the question of whether there is any untrammeled bilayer that might let the atorvastatin leak across, and whether biophysical properties such as log D or log P can account for this. Typically atorvastatin is in fact transported by a bile acid transporter known as OATP1B1 (SLCO or SLC21 family) (e.g., Hagenbuch and Stieger, 2013; Higgins et al., 2014).