Ultimately, the center's work has the potential to create a world where treatments can be increasingly personalized, so that drugs work better and with fewer complications. Precious recovery time no longer would be squandered when drugs developed for the general population fail to work for you. And those nasty drug side effects, sometimes as brutal as the problem you're trying to treat, could be virtually eliminated. To move closer toward this world of optimized therapies, the center draws from the disciplines of genetics, biochemistry, and pharmacology. It focuses on several key research themes, including the genetics of how drugs are metabolized, absorbed, distributed, and eliminated.
Enzymes are catalysts.
Enzyme deficiencies can be a major factor in how drugs are metabolized. Some people, because of their genetics, may not be able to make one of the metabolizing enzymes. So if they take a drug that needs that particular missing enzyme to metabolize it, the drug may not work for them at all. A battery of recent findings shows how valuable drug customization could be. In a 1998 Journal of the American Medical Association article, Lazarou, Pomeranz, and Corey indicate that adverse drug reactions could rank as high as the fifth leading cause of death in this country.