Genetic research in large-scale prospective studies may allow for a cheaper, more effective drug development process, according to a study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology this week. The study showed that genetic variants — which can mimic the specific action's of some drugs — prove useful to predict a drug's effectiveness before large amounts of money are put into a full-scale drug study.
Here are three things to know about the study:
- After a drug proved ineffective at inhibiting a lipoprotein that's associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, researchers at the University of Oxford (U.K.) and the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences (Beijing) teamed up to see if this outcome could have been predicted using a genetic variant that mimics the drug.
- Researchers explored the relationship between the genetic variant and cardiovascular diseases using data from over 90,000 participants in a prospective China Kadoorie Biobank study. They found that people with non-functioning genetic variants did not have a lower chance of developing cardiovascular diseases, results that matched that of the drug inhibitor study.
- The study's findings verify the method of using large-scale prospective studies to analyze the linkage between biological pathways associated with diseases prior to conducting expensive, large scale drug trials.
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