While the main subject addressed on this blog is programming with C#, from time to time I will mention some areas of research that I find interesting.
One of my major interests in psychopharmacology is the effect of P-Glycoprotein drug efflux transporters on blood brain barrier penetration. Efflux transporters are active transporters that kick things out of a cell. They were most likely evolved as a defensive mechanism. However, they pose a major problem for the administration of certain drug compounds. The presence of these transporters in the intestines has been known for some time. A more recent discovery is the presence of pgp transporters at the blood brain barrier. This is particularly interesting because it provides an explanation for why clozapine is succeeds in treating some schizophrenics when less toxic neuroleptics fail. It turns out that clozapine is one of the few neuroleptics that is not a pgp substrate. This implies that at least some treatment resistant schizophrenics over produce pgp transporters and that in the future some kind of combination therapy mixing a neuroleptic with an inhibitor of pgp may eliminate the need for clozapine. This is exciting because clozapine has a nasty tendency to cause agranular cytosis and patients taking the drug (at least here in the US) require weekly white cell counts.
For those interested in more information see
http://www.mhc.com/PGP/
The site doesn't seem to have been updated in quite a while but it does have a nice table of substrates and non-substrates as well as a short list of inducers.
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