Pharmacovigilance – Multimedia

Early computational evaluation of drug candidate properties related to its pharmaceutical safety (such as hERG inhibition induced cardiotoxicity or CYP3A4 inhibition responsible various unwanted drug-drug interactions) is becoming increasingly important in the drug discovery process.

Caffeine (1,3,7-trimethyl xanthine), known to have sensory and stimulatory effects, causes adverse effects on health which has resulted in an increased demand for de-caffeinated tea. The transformants obtained by RNAi are being analysed for partial and complete knockdown of one or both the genes using RT-PCR and reduction in caffeine production estimated by HPLC.

Kinase inhibitors (KIs) represent a new class of rationally designed drugs. The success of Imatinib has prompted the development of other KIs for the treatment of various cancers and inflammation. Although more successful than conventional therapies, myelotoxicity and cardiotoxicity are often major side effects of KIs. In order to predict if newly developed molecules demonstrated significant myelotoxicity or cardiotoxicity, we assessed a number of TKIs using in vitro models.

In a worldwide first proscpective phamacogenetic study preliminary results show reduction of adverse drug reactions and hospitilisation stays for geriatric patients after pharmacogenetic testing and medication interaction analysis to fit the medicine to the patient.

We have developed a microfluidic platform for mass sensitive analysis of whole blood that allows fast and reliable Point-of-Care blood typing of the AB0 system requiring small sample volumes. Potential application areas of the microfluidic platform include emergency medical aid, clinics and doctor's surgeries.

In this poster, we present IDBS’ ActivityBase™ - a single, integrated framework that brings together biological and chemical information. The software integrates with Oracle®, the industry standard relational database and familiar Microsoft® applications such as Word and Excel. With all discovery data in one system, the communication of information between scientists is simplified - enabling better, faster decisions and the need for IT support to integrate disparate systems is eliminated.

For pharmaceutical companies it is not only essential to identify HERG interacting compounds early during the drug discovery and development process, but also to understand potential effects of compounds on the cardiac action potential. This helps to increase the safety for patients, and to avoid the costs of unsuccessful projects in later phases.

The aim of this work was to investigate the interaction mechanism of the anthracyclines with the cytosolic reductases. Predictive models have been constructed by means of a molecular docking study, that offer utility in guiding the rational design of inhibitors of reductase activity.