Abstract

Feedback Control of Plasma Drug Levels Supported by Continuous In-Vivo Measurements

Netz Arroyo, Assistant Professor of Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

Personalized drug therapy seeks to tailor treatment to the individual, taking into consideration each person’s unique genotype and metabolism to determine a dose that maximizes drug efficacy and avoids toxicity. Realizing this goal has been extremely challenging, however, for two main reasons. First, it is difficult to determine the optimal drug dose for each patient due to our limited understanding of pharmacogenetics and physiology. Second, even the most sophisticated drug delivery approaches fail to account for hour-to-hour fluctuations in an individual’s metabolism driven by changes in health status, diet or drug interactions. Thus, there remains a pressing need for technologies supporting the real-time, in-vivo monitoring of drugs that would enable patient-specific, metabolism-responsive dosing. In response to this need, our laboratory pursues the development of reagentless sensing approaches that support continuous measurement in the body. During this talk, I will describe an electrochemical approach that relies on DNA aptamers to perform real-time monitoring of small molecule targets, and the use of this approach to study pharmacokinetic changes in rats that originate from biological and metabolic variability.