Researchers have created a powerful new tool to better understand how medications affect men and women differently, which will help lead to safer, more effective drugs in the future.
Women are known to experience a disproportionate amount of liver disorders as a result of medication.
They are, however, generally underrepresented in drug testing.
To address this, UVA researchers created sophisticated computer simulations of male and female livers and utilised them to identify sex-specific distinctions in how medications affect the tissues.
The new model has already revealed unique insights into the biological processes that occur in both men's and women's livers, the organ responsible for detoxification.
However, the model represents a valuable new tool for drug research, assisting in ensuring that new treatments do not have detrimental side effects.
“There are incredibly complex networks of genes and proteins that control how cells respond to drugs,” said UVA researcher Jason Papin, PhD, one of the model’s creators.
“We knew that a computer model would be required to try to answer these important clinical questions, and we’re hopeful these models will continue to provide insights that can improve healthcare.”
Papin, of UVA’s Department of Biomedical Engineering, developed the model in collaboration with Connor Moore, a PhD student, and Christopher Holstege, MD, a UVA emergency medicine physician and director of UVA Health’s Blue Ridge Poison Center.
“It is exceedingly important that both men and women receive the appropriate dose of recommended medications,” Holstege noted.
“Drug therapy is complex and toxicity can occur with subtle changes in dose for specific individuals.”
Before developing their model, the researchers first looked at the federal Food and Drug Administration’s Adverse Event Reporting System to evaluate the frequency of reported liver problems in men and women.
The scientists found that women consistently reported liver-related adverse events more often than did men.
The researchers then sought to explain why this might be the case.
To do that, they developed computer models of the male and female livers that integrated vast amounts of data on gene activity and metabolic processes within cells.
These cutting-edge liver simulations provided important insights into how drugs affect the tissue differently in men and women and allowed the researchers to understand why.
“We were surprised how many differences we found, especially in very diverse biochemical pathways,” said Moore, a biomedical engineering student in Papin's lab.
“We hope our results emphasise how important it is for future scientists to consider how both men and women are affected by their research.”
The work has already identified a key series of cellular processes that explain sex differences in liver damage, and the scientists are calling for more investigation of it to better understand “hepatotoxicity” – liver toxicity.
Ultimately, they hope their model will prove widely useful in developing safer drugs.
“We’re hopeful these approaches will be help address many other questions where men and women have differences in drug responses or disease processes,” Papin said.
“Our ability to build predictive computer models of complex systems in biology, like those in this study, is truly opening all kinds of new avenues for tackling some of the most challenging biomedical problems.”