Research as a Lone Wolf

I'M BACK. Hope you all missed me, because you know I missed sharing my life with you all. My spring break was pretty fun. I'm sure all of your spring breaks were pretty fun too. Honestly with nothing to do though sometimes I get a little crazy, so it feels good to be back.

Anyways, Carol is actually on vacation this week so if I went into the office there would not be anything for me to do, because she is in charge of all the PGX study stuff. So, I took this week to stay at home and research the different genetic and enzymatic processes behind the study so that I could better understand it and be able to explain it to others in the future.

So, to start my research (and I began to explain it in my Week 4 blog post if you want to refer to that), I looked at Cytochrome p450 which is a group of enzymes responsible for the metabolizing of a myriad of the most common drugs prescribed by doctors. Now it is important to understand these enzymes for the obvious reason that they deal with exactly what the PGX study hopes to accomplish which is to investigate which drugs metabolize well in the patient. Enzymes included in Cytochrome p450 are ones that start with the letters CYP. This is integral to know since half of the genes that are tested for in the PGX study start with the letters CYP and those genes code for the enzymes that start with the letters CYP.

In my Week 4 post I mentioned the CYP2C9 gene which codes for the enzyme of the same name. As it just so happens, some common drugs act as CYP2C9 enzyme inhibitors and if a patient is already a poor metabolizer of the drugs that are broken down by the CYP2C9 enzyme then they will experience adverse effects from those drugs. Looking at CYP2C9 as an example, we can understand more broadly how the study operates. By looking at the genetic code of a patient, we can see whether that patient is a poor, normal, or rapid metabolizer of 12 specific genes and then we can recommend the drugs that do not inhibit the production of the enzymes that the patient naturally does not produce very well.

Well, I can't divulge all of the information that I researched, because then this blog post would become more like a biochemistry paper instead of a blog post. However, learning about all of these biological mechanisms will make it much easier to explain everything when I inevitably have to present what I did over ten weeks in a power point. But I am glad I did the research, because it was actually pretty interesting. Soooooooooooo i'm done here I guess. See ya'll next week. Quick shout out to Dalton for leaving a dope comment. This gif is for you!

Get Schwifty!!!!!!