A novel variant allele of OATP-C (SLCO1B1) found in a Japanese patient with pravastatin-induced myopathy.

We have recently found that the frequency of OATP-C*15 is significantly higher in patients who experienced myopathy after receiving pravastatin or atorvastatin than in patients without myopathy. However, there were two patients who experienced pravastatin-induced myopathy despite the fact that they did not possess OATP-C*15 or other known mutations of OATP-C that have been reported to decrease the function of OATP-C. In this study, we sequenced all of the exons and exon-intron junctions of OATP-C of the two patients and found a novel mutation in exon 12 of OATP-C in one of the patients. In this mutation (1628T>G), there is a substitution of Leu to Trp at position 543 in transmembrane-spanning domain 10 of OATP-C. However, the frequency of this mutation in the Japanese population appears to be very low (<1%).