Word: herskowitz
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...more traditional ways, wants to reduce the cost of bringing a medication to market--now estimated at $500 million. One way to do it is to limit trials to those people most likely to respond to a given drug. This too is governed by genetics. Says Ira Herskowitz, a biochemist and biophysicist at the University of California, San Francisco: "We're all different, we have different hair color and different features, right? How can we not metabolize drugs differently...
That's why Herskowitz and his colleagues have launched a project to unravel exactly what--at the genetic level--makes some people benefit from drugs and others not. They suspect that one major factor is a class of proteins called membrane transporters. These proteins act as molecular gatekeepers, deciding which foreign substances in the bloodstream will be taken into and which rejected by individual cells. If, for example, people lack the gene for an inactivating enzyme, says Herskowitz, "a standard dose of a drug will be more potent. If they have an extra copy of the gene, a standard dose...
...this month, UCSF researchers have done about 20% of the initial DNA analysis and have found more than a dozen variants, which are now being screened in cells. The scientists on tap to look for variants that haven't been analyzed yet, says Herskowitz, "are chomping at the bit, saying, 'When is my gene going to be done...
Clinicians, meanwhile, are assembling a list of 1,500 patients being treated for depression, whose varying responses to medication will be carefully documented. Eventually the clinical data will be combined with the genetic studies. Says Herskowitz: "It's interesting to see the changes to the cell, but what you really want to know is how someone with that change would respond differently to Prozac, or to an anticancer compound. That's more elaborate, which is why this clinical aspect is exciting stuff...