Grant: Operating Grant

Drugs can be a great benefit for the treatment of diseases, but they can also cause serious side effects or adverse reactions. One type of adverse reaction that is particularly difficult to prevent is the idiosyncratic drug reaction (idiosyncratic means particular to an individual). These are adverse effects that do not involve the therapeutic effect of the drug and do not occur in most patients, but when they do occur they can be quite serious and it is usually impossible to predict who will have such and adverse reaction. It appears that most of these adverse reactions are allergic in nature, that is they are mediated by the immune system, but they are hard to study. It would be quite useful to reproduce such adverse reactions in animals so they could be more easily studied, but they are also unpredictable in animals. We have developed animal models of two types of idiosyncratic drug reactions involving the skin (skin rash) and the liver. These models are being used to understand and ultimately prevent such adverse reactions.