Research
Predicting and Preventing Adverse Interactions between Drugs and Dietary Supplements
Many people use dietary supplements (such as herbs, minerals, or probiotics) with the goal of being healthy or preventing disease. Our goal with this project is to help support safe use of these dietary supplements, by determining whether they might interact with pharmaceutical drugs consumed at the same time. This research is conducted by a multi-university collaborative group called the Center of Excellence for Natural Product Drug Interaction. The Cech group’s role in this project is identifying which dietary supplements should be given to the subjects who participate in clinical studies. It’s a complicated task because dietary supplements are very complex and differ in composition from one sample to the next. For example, we studied how drinking green tea influences drug metabolism. You could buy hundreds of different green tea products off the shelf at a grocery store. Which one should we use for the study? The paper referenced here describes our journey to answer this complicated question.
Madeline working in Dr. Nadja Cech’s lab.
The composite score (CS) is a metric developed by the Cech Laboratory to compare samples and determine their similarity and difference. A publication describing this idea can be found here.
