Drug Metabolism and Chemical Structural Alerts

Dr. Sidney Nelson, PhD
Professor, Department of Medicinal Chemistry
Dean, School of Pharmacy
University of Washington
Seattle, WA

Several organic chemical substructures present in a variety of drugs have been found to be metabolized to reactive intermediates that can perturb cellular homeostasis. This presentation will review those substructures that have been associated with substantial risk of toxicity in humans. Structural analogs will be highlighted as useful tools both to identify specific substructures with toxic liability, and to characterize likely mechanisms of reactive metabolite formation. Some examples will be provided of how this paradigm can be used to identify genomic and proteomic changes in cells associated with some substructures that may eventually provide predictive biomarkers of cellular injury.

Dr. Nelson, Professor of Medicinal Chemistry and Dean of the School of Pharmacy, University of Washington, enjoys both teaching and research. He has received the John J. Abel Award from ASPET for research as a young investigator (1981), was elected a Fellow of AAAS (1986), received the Sato International Award for research from the Japanese Pharmaceutical Society (1992) and the School of Pharmacy Gibaldi Excellence in Teaching Award (1995), was a Wellcome Visiting Professor in Basic Medical Sciences (1998), and was listed as an ISI Highly Cited Author (2002). He has over 250 research publications, one patent and one licensed software package.