Award Funding Supports Methods to Predict Drug-induced Liver Injury

Agilent Technologies, Inc and the Agilent Technologies Foundation recently announced that Russell S. Thomas, PhD, of the Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences has been selected for an Agilent Thought Leader Award to support his work developing methods to predict drug-induced liver injury. The award includes funding from the Agilent Technologies Foundation as well as instrumentation from the company, including a 6460 triple quadrupole LC/MS
and an Agilent microarray scanner.

Dr Thomas is director of the Institute for Chemical Safety Sciences at the Hamner, where researchers are applying a systems biology approach in an effort to predict druginduced liver injury. This includes integration of data from transcriptomics, metabolomics, and genome-wide association studies. Drug-induced liver injury is a primary reason regulators prohibit drugs or pull them off the market. One of the goals of Dr Thomas’ work is to eventually be able to identify patients with genetic susceptibility to liver damage from certain drugs. This could reduce injuries and even allow some previously banned drugs to be reintroduced.

“Drug-induced liver injury is a major problem in the development of safe and effective therapeutics,” said Dr Thomas. “Current analyses of the genome sequence data of patients that have experienced drug-induced liver injury have failed to identify any susceptibility factors that are common across multiple drugs. I am grateful to receive the Agilent Thought Leader Award as an acknowledgment of the importance of the work we are conducting at the Hamner Institutes. The award will allow us to evaluate whether these susceptibility factors can be identified when the drugs are grouped based on the signaling pathways they activate in the liver and ultimately predict which patients may be at risk.” The Agilent Thought Leader Program promotes fundamental advances in the life sciences by contributing financial support, products and expertise to the research of thought leaders.