Making Drugs Personal

With an organ transplant, you must take a concoction of immunosuppressing drugs that work to stop your body’s immune system from rejecting the new organ. Currently, doctors make educated guesses on how high the dose should be of these drugs in response to how a patient responds to therapy, which means constantly changing medications and treatment procedures. But now researchers have come up with a mathematical way of making these decisions, helping to prevent side effects and leading to better responses in patients. Parabolic Personalised Dosing was shown to pinpoint optimum drug doses in patients who had a liver transplant, producing personalised graphs to predict a patient’s next dose of medication. Pictured is a mosaic representing twenty patient responses to treatment; colours indicate drug doses, allowing the doctor to visualise how best to move forward. This approach could help in other diseases like cancer, where treatment could be better managed.

Written by Katie Panteli

Katie Panteli

Writer

Katie, a Warwick Biomed graduate, works for a science-publishing house in London with some of the world's most respected scientific minds. She's most interested in human biology, anything and everything that makes us tick.

• Image courtesy of Dr. Dong-Keun Lee, Dean Ho Group, UCLA
• University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
• Image copyright held by original authors
• Research published in Science Translational Medicine, April 2016