Filipino molecular biologists at the country’s largest and leading pharmaceutical and healthcare company United Laboratories, Inc. (Unilab) studied the genetic variations in a human body called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that could determine the body’s response to TB treatment.
Unilab probed the link between the SNP typing of Filipinos and TB treatment to help doctors better understand the disease and determine more effective therapeutic regimen to Filipinos.
According to government data, TB is the sixth leading cause of death nationwide. This translates to 80 Filipinos dying from the disease daily, with two-thirds of the more than 85 million population harboring TB bacilli and about 463,000 are active TB cases. These figures put RP at ninth rank in TB incidence worldwide.
The Unilab research studied SNPs from the blood obtained from healthy Filipino volunteers. Further study into these SNPs revealed that 47.3 percent of Filipinos are rapid acetylators, meaning their body can quickly break down an anti-TB drug like isoniazid, and thus have low risk to the toxic effects of the drugs.
The 11.6 percent are slow acetylators, which means anti-TB drugs like isoniazid stays longer in the patients’ blood, which may put them at a greater risk to the toxic effects of the drug.
“We plan to do more clinical studies on the remaining 41.1 percent of subjects who were found to be of the intermediate acetylator type,” says Unilab Medical Director Alexander Tuazon, “Doing so will determine and verify the risk to isoniazid-induced liver toxicity.”
Unilab’s study provides better understanding of the link between the genetic variation of Filipino patients and TB drugs like isoniazid, and thus provides doctors with substantial information to more effectively determine the appropriate treatment to patients. Unilab is doing other studies of human genes’ link to other diseases as part of its efforts to make healthcare products even better for Filipinos. |
