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Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common sustained clinical arrhythmia, with a lifetime incidence of up to 37%, and is a major contributor to population morbidity and mortality. Important components of AF management include control of cardiac rhythm, rate, and thromboembolic risk. In this narrative review article, we focus on rhythm-control therapy. The available therapies for cardiac rhythm control include antiarrhythmic drugs and catheter-based ablation procedures; both of these are presently neither optimally effective nor safe. In order to develop improved treatment options, it is necessary to use preclinical models, both to identify novel mechanism-based therapeutic targets and to test the effects of putative therapies before initiating clinical trials. Extensive research over the past 30 years has provided many insights into AF mechanisms that can be used to design new rhythm-maintenance approaches. However, it has proven very difficult to translate these mechanistic discoveries into clinically applicable safe and effective new therapies. The aim of this article is to explore the challenges that underlie this phenomenon. We begin by considering the basic problem of AF, including its clinical importance, the current therapeutic landscape, the drug development pipeline, and the notion of upstream therapy. We then discuss the currently available preclinical models of AF and their limitations, and move on to regulatory hurdles and considerations and then review industry concerns and strategies. Finally, we evaluate potential paths forward, attempting to derive insights from the developmental history of currently used approaches and suggesting possible paths for the future. While the introduction of successful conceptually innovative new treatments for AF control is proving extremely difficult, one significant breakthrough is likely to revolutionize both AF management and the therapeutic development landscape., (Published on behalf of the European Society of Cardiology. All rights reserved. © The Author(s) 2021. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

Abstract: Multiple marketing withdrawals due to proarrhythmic concerns occurred in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom in the late 1980s to early 2000s. This primer reviews the clinical implications of a drug's identified proarrhythmic liability, the issues associated with these safety‐related withdrawals, and the actions taken by the International Council for Harmonisation of Technical Requirements for Pharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH) and by regulatory agencies in terms of changing drug development practices and introducing new nonclinical and clinical tests to asses proarrhythmic liability. ICH Guidelines S7B and E14 were released in 2005. Since then, they have been adopted by many regional regulatory authorities and have guided nonclinical and clinical proarrhythmic cardiac safety assessments during drug development. While this regulatory paradigm has been successful in preventing drugs with unanticipated potential for inducing the rare but potentially fatal polymorphic ventricular arrhythmia torsade de pointes from entering the market, it has led to the termination of drug development programs for other potentially useful medicines because of isolated results from studies with limited predictive value. Research efforts are now exploring alternative approaches to better predict potential proarrhythmic liabilities. For example, in the domain of human electrocardiographic assessments, concentration‐response modeling conducted during phase 1 clinical development has recently become an accepted alternate primary methodology to the ICH E14 “thorough QT/QTc” study for defining a drug's corrected QT interval prolongation liability under certain conditions. When a drug's therapeutic benefit is considered important at a public health level but there is also an identified proarrhythmic liability that may result from administration of the single drug in certain individuals and/or drug‐drug interactions, marketing approval will be accompanied by appropriate directions in the drug's prescribing information. Health‐care professionals in the fields of medicine and pharmacy need to consider the prescribing information in conjunction with individual patients’ clinical characteristics and concomitant medications when prescribing and dispensing such drugs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thorough QT/QTc studies have become an integral part of early drug development programs, with major clinical and regulatory implications. This analysis expands on existing pharmacodynamic models of QT interval analysis by incorporating the influence of glycemic changes on the QT interval in a semimechanistic manner. A total of 21 healthy subjects enrolled in an open-label phase 1 pilot study and provided continuous electrocardiogram monitoring and plasma glucose and insulin concentrations associated with a 24-hour baseline assessment. The data revealed a transient decrease in QTc, with peak suppression occurring approximately 3 hours after the meal. A semimechanistic modeling approach was applied to evaluate temporal delays between meals and subsequent changes that might influence QT measurements. The food effect was incorporated into a model of heart rate dynamics, and additional delayed effects of the meal on QT were incorporated using a glucose-dependent hypothetical transit compartment. The final model helps to provide a foundation for the future design and analysis of QT studies that may be confounded by meals. This study has significant implications for QT study assessment following a meal or when a cohort is receiving a medication that influences postprandial glucose concentrations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]