Roche research ‘could help reveal how drugs are metabolised’

Roche has revealed that new research published this week in Nature Biotechnology could provide new insight into how the body metabolises drugs. Roche scientists used a genetic analysis of mice to study the factors relating to the regulation of warfarin, the anticoagulant.

The company claims that the methodology applied to drugs in mice could be adapted for a wide range of drugs in humans. Roche scientists discovered that their new method could reveal more about the human genes that regulate drug metabolisms because in mice they were able to “quickly identify genetic variants within drug metabolising enzymes”.

Gary Peltz, head of genetics and genomics at Roche’s base in Palo Alto, California, said: “This research and the computational method will help scientists and clinicians better understand the drugs they are developing, as well as the diseases they target.”

“It can also be used to identify genetic susceptibility factors affecting drug-induced toxicity,” he added.

Roche concluded by saying that such research was “essential” to find out more about how genetics affect drug metabolism.

Last week the British Medical Journal published a research paper detailing the effects of the different metabolising processes of hypertension drugs in patients of different ethnic background. It showed that black patients were 1.5 times more likely to suffer from bleeding than white patients when using anticoagulants and that black patients are three times more likely to develop angio-oedema than non-black patients when using hypertension drugs.

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