DIFFERENCES ARE CRITICAL
It is no longer a secret that women and men exhibit different symptoms during a heart attack. It is also clear that adverse drug reactions occur almost twice as often in women as in men.1 However, the role of sex as a biological factor in the development of adverse drug reactions is poorly understood.2 One thing is for sure — there is a significant difference between the sexes in the expression of a gene important for drug metabolism.3 What do sex-specific differences generally mean for health research? What role do they play in applied basic research, for example in understanding the genesis of diseases or in the search for new therapeutic approaches? The editors asked five ISAS scientists to comment on sex-specific aspects in their fields of research.
1 Zucker I, Prendergast BJ. Sex differences in pharmacokinetics predict adverse drug reactions in women. Biol Sex Differ. 2020;11(1):32. Published 2020 Jun 5. https://doi.org/10.1186/S13293-020-00308-5. 2 Ibid 3 Guengerich FP, Waterman MR, Egli M. Recent Structural Insights into Cytochrome P450 Function. Trends Pharmacol Sci. 2016 Aug;37(8):625-640. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tips.2016.05.006.
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ANNUAL REPORT 2021
