July 17, 2007
Mary Paine, PhD, has been awarded a $300,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to explore interactions between foods and drugs.
“We know a great deal about drug-drug interactions but comparatively little about how foods and other natural products interact with drugs,” Paine says. “Typically, the only thing patients are told about food and their medicine is whether or not they should take their pills with a meal.”
Paine is interested in foods that can contribute to what has come to be called “the grapefruit juice effect.” Since the early 1990s, researchers have known that chemical compounds in grapefruit juice can impede the breakdown of some medicines in the body. This can lead to unexpected and dangerously high concentrations of the drug in a patient’s system.
Paine plans to start with cranberry juice, a personal favorite of hers and a food that has certainly come under scrutiny.
There have been a number of individual case reports where patients have suffered adverse drug reactions to the blood thinner warfarin that may have been due to drinking cranberry juice. This has led some agencies, such as the FDA and the United Kingdom’s Committee on the Safety of Medicine, to caution against taking warfarin with cranberry juice. Paine would like to find out whether or not there is an identifiable compound in cranberry juice that could interact with drugs in addition to warfarin.
“Cranberry juice has been shown to prevent urinary tract infection, and many people—especially women—drink the juice for that reason,” Paine says. “As we argued in the grant, the incidence of cranberry juice consumption in combination with drugs could be high in certain segments of the population who could be at increased risk of untoward effects.
The grant, “Mechanisms Underlying Drug-Diet Interaction,” is worth more than $300,000 a year and is renewable for up to four years. Paine is a research assistant professor in the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics and director of the School’s Cellular Metabolism and Transport Core.
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