An off-switch for drugs’ toxic side effects

When medications linger in the human body, they sometimes produce toxic side effects.  Professor Alexandros Makriyannis, the George D. Behrakis Trustee Chair in Pharmaceutical Biotechnology and Director of the Center for Drug Discovery at Northeastern, explained that many things can happen to a drug inside our bodies once it is ingested. For instance, the drug can be modified into other byproducts with their own undesirable and unpredictable effects. Or it can remain embedded in the body’s fatty tissues and then be slowly released into the circulatory system.

“If you had a way of controlling how long this drug sits in the body,” Makriyannis said, “that would be a beneficial effect. It would be a safer drug.”

In research recently published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry and Medicinal Chemistry Letters, Makriyannis and his team present not just one such drug but a whole series of them. “We call…