The study that improves treatment for a type of schizophrenia, carried out by researchers from the Pasteur Institute de Montevideo, the Vilardebó Hospital and the Faculty of Chemistry (Udelar), won the National Grand Prize for Medicine awarded each year by the Academy of Medicine of Uruguay.
The award ceremony took place on Thursday, December 12 at 6:30 p.m. in the Executive Tower Auditorium.
About the study
The work, entitled ‘Study of the variables that affect the response to clozapine in patients at the Vilardebó Hospital’, analyzed the interaction in the organism of a drug used to treat a type of schizophrenia that affects around 10,000 people in the country.
In Uruguay, more than 30,000 people suffer from schizophrenia, and 30% do not respond to conventional antipsychotics. This type of schizophrenia is called resistant schizophrenia. For this group of patients there is clozapine, which controls the disease, but generates adverse effects. In order to understand the effect of this drug, the project motinored 108 adult men and women treated with clozapine at the Vilardebó Hospital for two years.
From genetic and metabolic analyses, the team observed that, in patients that
smoked, the drug is metabolized more rapidly, so doses should be higher. Meanwhile, overweight patients are associated with slower metabolization rates and increased adverse effects compared to non-overweight ones.
These findings led to personalized clozapine dosing, which not only improved treatment efficacy but also reduced adverse effects.
Different professionals from the Institute participated in the study: Magdalena Cárdenas, Clara Menéndez and José Badano, from the Human Molecular Genetics Laboratory; Valentina Blanco and Alfonso Cayota, from the Functional Genomics Laboratory; and Lucía Spangenberg, from the Bioinformatics Unit. The team also includes Ismael Olmos, Carina Ricciardi, Mauricio Mato, Natalia Guevara, Sabrina Acuña, Cecilia Maldonado, Marta Vázquez and Mauricio Toledo, from the Vilardebó Hospital and the Faculty of Chemistry.
