Your skin tone could affect the medications you take.
Sophie Zaaijer, scientific consultant and researcher at the University of California, Riverside, explores why.
Dr. Sophie Zaaijer is a multifaceted innovator at the intersection of science, entrepreneurship, and the arts. She is a consultant and researcher affiliated with the University of California, Riverside.
Dr. Zaaijer’s current focus is on identifying the necessary, scientific and infrastructure requirements to establish inclusive pre-clinical and clinical workflows within the pharmaceutical industry and academic settings.
With a passion for advancing biomedical research by improving research methodologies, she previously founded FIND Genomics, a startup backed by the prestigious National Institutes of Health, Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute and others.
Her expertise is grounded in extensive academic experience. Dr. Zaaijer is patent holder, and conducted postdoctoral research at the New York Genome Center and Columbia University, following her Ph.D. in molecular biology and genetics from Cancer Research UK and University College London. Her research journey includes research at the National Institutes of Health and Harvard Medical School.
How Your Skin Tone Could Affect Your Meds
Have you wondered why some medications work better for certain people than others? Interestingly, about 20% of drugs show differences in how well they work and how safe they are among people of different races and ethnicities.
Now, what if I told you that the color of your skin could in fact play a role?
My colleague and I uncovered that melanin — the pigment responsible for skin color — can act like a sponge, attracting certain drugs. This binding effect is found to influence the amount of active medication reaching its intended targets in the body. As a result, doses of such drugs can be ineffective for some people. As we point out in our perspective paper, this phenomenon is barely studied at all.
The timing of raising awareness for this issue is spot-on because new innovations in cell biology now allow us to test effects that melanin might have during the earliest stages of drug development: before a drug is tested on a person.
Using 3D skin-in-a-dish models scientists can directly test if drugs bind to melanin. The results of such tests provide valuable information to clinical trial strategists.
My current research focuses on raising awareness for race- and ethnicity-biased characteristics that might influence drug responses. Skin color is just the tip of the iceberg; we need to identify and describe more such unknown characteristics. Testing for these effects ought to become standard practice in the lab to reduce the risk for differential adverse drug effects from 20% to say … none?
As we strive for more equitable healthcare, it is crucial that we understand how drugs may work differently among various human population groups, starting in the earliest stages of drug development.
Read More:
[Springer Nature Link] – Implementing differentially pigmented skin models for predicting drug response variability across human ancestries
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