Hospitals, Pharma

Do statins work? UCSF studying the pharmacogenomics of these widely prescribed drugs.

Statins are a widely prescribed drug to reduce cholesterol, but their efficacy has come under fire as of late. UCSF researchers taking a precision medicine approach to statin use, studying their pharmacogenomics.

Statins are a class of drugs prescribed routinely to lower cholesterol – but they’ve recently been coming under fire. In many patients statins could be largely ineffective in preventing heart disease – and could lead to serious side effects like type 2 diabetes and myopathy. A paper on “imprecision medicine” earlier this year in Nature actually highlighted that Crestor – one of the top 10 drugs on the market – may only help 1 in 20 patients.

This is why a precision medicine approach to this drug’s usage could wildly change the paradigm of cholesterol drug prescription.

To that end a team of researchers at University of California, San Francisco just received a five-year, $13.2 million NIH grant for precision medicine research in statin response. This is in keeping with UCSF’s heavy focus on precision medicine, which has been teaming with industry to examine the underlying genetics of disease diagnosis and drug response.

Dr. Ronald Krauss, a senior scientist at Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, will take a multidisciplinary approach to learn the genetics behind statin response – as well as whether it has adverse effects like myopathy and type 2 diabetes.

The UCSF researchers have actually built a Center for Pharmacogenomics in Precision Medicine, incorporating genomic, transcriptomic and metabolomic tools to examine the genetic predisposition of a patient’s response to a drug.

The CHORI study will work by recruiting statin users from Kaiser Permanente of Northern California that have reacted negatively to the drug – meaning, it hasn’t prevent a heart attack, or they’ve developed myopathy or diabetes.

Krauss is a primary researcher in the Pharmacogenomics Research Network, an NIH-funded initiative which has been examining the genetic underpinnings of drug response since 2000. 

[IMAGE: Flickr user AJ Cann]

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