October 9, 2008
Search tool that makes drugs safer is poised for growth
By Melinda Young
School of Pharmacy
Between 1994 and 2005, the number of prescription drugs purchased in the United States increased 71 percent (from 2.1 billion to 3.6 billion), according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
And between 1999 and 2004, the Centers for Disease Control found, deaths from accidental drug interactions rose 68 percent.
Researchers have been studying the risks of drug interactions for years. At the UW School of Pharmacy, a group of investigators has created a database that allows scientists to better understand these risks before the drugs ever get on the shelves.
UW’s Metabolism and Transport Drug Interaction Database is a Web-based search and analysis tool designed for use by scientists from academia, government and the pharmaceutical industry who work in drug discovery and development. It compiles and summarizes published data about new drugs and drug interactions. While it might be little known outside of these fields, the database is playing a significant role in making new drugs safer for the general public.
By entering a wide range of search queries, scientists can easily find relevant information that allows them to optimize their drug research. In short, it gives scientists a better grasp of the potential risks of the medications they’re developing.
The brainchild of Dr. Rene Levy, professor and former chair of the department of pharmaceutics, the database launched as an official venture through UW Tech Transfer in 2002. Levy devoted himself to creating the database (funding his initial efforts through grants to his lab) because he recognized the need for more widespread knowledge about the risks of drug interactions.
“Doctors learn to first do no harm,” he says. “But drug interactions violate this tenet of the practice of medicine. Physicians prescribing medications can end up inadvertently hurting their patients because of a lack of available knowledge.”
For example, consider in recent years the FDA’s withdrawal of the antihistamine Seldane after reports of sometimes-fatal cardiac arrhythmias when the drug was taken with erythromycin or ketoconazole. Or the withdrawal of another antihistamine, astemizole, because of rare, but potentially fatal, interactions with erythromycin or even with grapefruit juice.
It is these kinds of dangerous interactions that the database group seeks to make easier for researchers to detect and prevent in the preclinical phase.
Levy’s efforts to make knowledge about drug interactions more widespread are paying off. Researchers from major pharmaceutical companies and from throughout the world subscribe to the database. It is also one of the University’s top-10 revenue generators.
Further, a new, upgraded version of the database was launched July 1. It includes a disease-specific search capability that allows scientists to search for drug interaction potentials for medications related to almost 30 specific diseases.
This feature is especially significant, according to the database team, because now scientists can easily find a succinct overview of exactly what to watch for when developing a new drug targeting a specific disease.
If scientists are trying to develop an anti-diabetes drug, for example, now they can quickly find out exactly which disease-specific enzyme they need to worry about in their research.
So far, subscribers have responded enthusiastically to the new version of the database.
In addition, the database will soon be represented by the United Kingdom’s Lhasa Services, a subsidiary of Lhasa Limited, a nonprofit global supplier of knowledge-based software and databases. Through this arrangement, Lhasa will promote subscriptions to the UW database to pharmaceutical research institutions throughout Europe.
The UW already has a similar agreement in place with Japan’s Infocom Corporation to distribute the database in Japan. Its contract with that company was recently renewed through 2010.
Considering these recent developments, the UW Metabolism and Transport Drug Interaction Database is on track to become a major international player in the field of drug-interaction research — making prescription drugs safer on a global scale.
