Recent Trends in Drug Interaction Studies based on Drug Metabolism

In pharmacotherapy, drugs are often taken with other drugs to overcome the disease. Due to an increase in the elderly population and chronic diseases, the combinational co-administering method of drugs is increasing, and the importance of drug interaction evaluation for drug development and clinical application is also increasing. In the case of combination therapy, co-administration of drug may occur drug-drug interactions due to the competition of endogenous proteins such as drug transporter, drug metabolic enzyme, and plasma protein, including direct physicochemical interactions of drugs. Drug metabolism-based drug interactions are representative of drug-drug interactions in clinical cases. Drug metabolism mostly occurs in the liver by cytochrome P450s as representative drug metabolic enzymes. In addition, phase 2 metabolic enzymes such as glucuronidases and sulfotransferases also have a significant effect on metabolism-based drug interactions. Drug-drug interactions can affect drug efficacy and side effects, and in some cases can be life threatening or cause serious side effects. The combination use of drugs is required to be aware of the potential interactions that may occur with co-administration in order to use the drug safely. Therefore, the pharmacist as an expert in medicine must have the relevant knowledge and ability to cope with problems as needed. In this approach, we introduced the recent research trends on drug interactions that can occur based on the metabolism of drugs among these drug interactions, and discussed clinical significance of drug-drug interactions.