The University of Queensland has acquired a powerful new instrument which will advance understanding of the way the human body disposes of drugs.
The University's Centre for Studies of Drug Disposition (CSDD) will take delivery of the $360,000 liquid chromatograph and triple stage mass spectrometer at an unveiling ceremony later this month.
CSDD directors Professor Ron Dickinson and Dr Wayne Hooper hope the new technology, enabling them to track increasingly minuscule traces of chemicals within the body, will ultimately help explain why some people become hypersensitive to certain drugs.
Researchers in the Centre, based at the University's Medicine Department at Royal Brisbane Hospital, specialise in the complex metabolic pathways of particular neurological and anti-inflammatory drugs.
The acquisition will maintain the centre's position at the leading edge of drug disposition technology which is used by national and international pharmaceutical companies in the development of new drugs with less potential side effects.
"For the type of services that the centre provides to industry, it is the largest and best recognised in the country," Dr Hooper said.
"This instrument will be enormously valuable and there would not be one area of our research that will not benefit from its acquisition.
"It is designed to detect the most minute traces of chemicals in bodily fluids such as samples of blood or urine, for example."
Professor Dickinson said the research not only studied what impacts drugs had on the body, but more tellingly, "what the body does to the drugs".
"For example, with aspirin, it is metabolised and eliminated from the body within 24 hours and we can recover (trace) about 60 to 80 percent of the dose as various metabolites," he said.
"But with the anti-epileptic drug valproate, we can only account for 50 per cent of it which begs the question, where is it all going?"
Professor Dickinson said that with 150 deaths attributed to an adverse reaction to Valproate (severe liver toxicity) in the last 20 years, their research in this area had very obvious benefits to the community.
Media inquiries: Professor Ron Dickinson, telephone 07 3365 5337 or Dr Wayne Hooper telephone 07 3365 5305.
