IRB Barcelona helps detect and prevent drug side effects
Researchers Miquel Duran and Patrick Aloy have described the molecular processes of more than 1,100 adverse effects, which will now be made available to the whole scientific community.
By Biocat
Researchers at the Institute for Biomedical Research (IRB Barcelona) Miquel Duran and Patrick Aloy have analyzed 1,162 of the 1,600 known side effects in a study recently published in the journal Chemistry and Biology, which is part of the Cell group. With this work, these scientists aim to shed light on the subject to minimize and anticipate adverse drug reactions (ADR) during the drug design process, as these undesired consequences are often discovered once the product is already on the market. For this reason, they are among the top ten causes of death around the world, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Miquel Duran and Patrick Aloy have followed a painstaking study method, registering all the drugs that can cause each side effect. After that, they analyzed the proteins that each one interacts with and the chemical structure of the products. Thus, they have formulated molecular hypotheses for 1,162 ADR, which will now be available to all researchers. “We are providing the scientific community with lists of proteins and structural trails associated with side effects, which we call alerts and can be used by drug design experts,” explains Aloy, a biologist specializing in systems biology, researcher at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) and head of the IRB Barcelona Structural Bioinformatics and Network Biology Laboratory research group.
The Catalan scientists explain that in order to understand the root of a particular side effect, both biology and chemistry must be taken into account. Most of the ADR, 446 of the 1,162 analyzed, can be deciphered from a biological standpoint, 68 from a chemical standpoint, and 648 require both biological and chemical explanations. According to Duran, lead author of the article and PhD student in Aloy’s laboratory, “for each side effect there is a biological part we already know, but this part doesn’t offer us a complete picture of the mechanism and perhaps we will be able to fill this gap by looking at the chemical structure.”
Pharmacovigilance is the prevention and detection of side effects of drugs and is applied throughout their cycle. The WHO explains that, although no drugs are free of side effects, most can be avoided. This new study by the IRB Barcelona expands knowledge on adverse effects and helps avoid them in creating new drugs in the future.
More information is available on the IRB Barcelona website.
Original article:
- Analysis of Chemical and Biological Features Yields Mechanistic Insights into Drug Side Effects. Authors: Miquel Duran-Frigola and Patrick Aloy. Chemistry and Biology. 18 Apr 2013.