Dr. Jeong-An Gim has been awarded a government
grant from the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Korea on September 1, 2018 to study epigenetic/epigenomic changes after drug treatment. The grant will cover a year and the total
research funding is $40,000 or ~40 million Korean Won. The title of Dr. Gim's research was "An Association Study
Between the Pharmacoepigenomic Patterns of Drug-metabolizing Enzymes and the Pharmacokinetics
of Tacrolimus", which aimed to identify several sensitive genetic regions associated
with the pharmacokinetics of tacrolimus, an immunosuppressive agent frequently used in transplant patients. Blood samples for this proposed study have been already collected
from two previous studies ( Choi
et al., Kim et al., 2017 ), and the samples will be outsourced to Theragen Etex for the next generation sequencing (NGS) analysis.
The proposed study is the first of its kind applying the state-of-the-art technologies to investigating the epigenetic/epigenomic effect on the exposure to tacrolimus in humans. Dr. Gim has been interested in finding an optimal epigenetic state
to maximize the efficacy of a drug while minimizing potential adverse events, and tacrolimus will be his first bet.
Prof. Lee congratulated Dr. Gim, saying "Converging the principles of clinical pharmacology, genomics, and eipgenetics/epigenomics, we will have a much better understanding how humans handle the administered drug." Prof. Lee added, "Dr. Gim's approach is innovative, and his research exemplifies how convergent approaches can be adopted to solve problems in drug development."
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