Yellow vision, pseudo-pulmonary obstruction, involuntary body movements, respiratory paralysis. These are some of the 1,600 known side effects (SEs) produced by drugs. Adverse effects are one of the main causes of hospital admission in the west. These effects are difficult to predict, and in practice specific assays are required to test the safety of agents in pre-clinical phases, thus these effects are often not discovered until the drug has been launched. A study published by scientists at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), based in the Parc Científic de Barcelona, seeks to fill this information gap.

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The objective of the study is to shed light on the molecular bases of SEs and provide medical chemists with the tools to design safer drugs and to predict their effects. The study collects and proposes molecular hypotheses for 1,162 side effects. This information, which is about to be tested experimentally, is now available to the scientific community through the most recent issue of the specialized journal Chemistry and Biology, part of the Cell group.

The researchers Miquel Duran and Patrick Aloy collated all the drugs that cause each known SE. Next, they studied the proteins with which they interact and their chemical structure. “For most of the side effects we have a biological hypothesis, and for many of these cases we also have chemical information about the drug, which may be useful to predict a specific secondary effect,” explains ICREA researcher Patrick Aloy, head of the “Structural Bioinformatics and Network Biology” at IRB Barcelona.

Of the 1,162 SEs for which they have found a molecular description, 446 can be explained solely on the basis of biology and 68 only on the basis of chemistry, while for 648 (56%) both biological and chemical considerations are required.

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