The benefits of gender-based medicines

Some medicines should be separately targeted towards men or women because of significant metabolic differences that may affect disease onset and progression, German scientists have found.

The researchers’ conclusion, published in the online journal PLoS Genetics, was based on an analysis of blood samples from more than 3,300 volunteers.

Professor Jerzy Adamski of the Munich Centre of Health Sciences, and colleagues, measured the concentration of 131 metabolites in these samples and found significant gender-based differences for 113 of them.

Metabolites are substances derived from, or involved in, a range of metabolic processes. A person’s metabolic profile has been described as a signature that can reveal details about biochemical processes currently taking place in the body.

When combined with genetic studies, a metabolic profile can provide insight into the regulation of genes that are linked with complex diseases such as diabetes or Alzheimer’s.

Professor Adamski said researchers questioned why there were several; very frequent diseases worldwide that have a clear “gender difference”, such as diabetes and cancers such as lung, colon and thyroid.

“Our contribution to understanding this is to find out which pathways at the metabolic level are really distinguishing the sexes,” he said.

To do this, researchers scanned the whole human genome to look for tiny changes in the DNA called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that might help explain what researchers were seeing at the metabolic level. The next step was to see if these were connected to specific genes.

“By this approach, we were able to say what the biological importance of a single SNP is rather than saying because the SNP is in a known gene it should have an impact,” Professor Adamski said.

He said the current approach to treating illness and disease does not take into account metabolic differences in men and women.

“You could fine tune the system to make the drug more efficient and there is also an application in disease diagnosis,” he said.

“For example, the pre-diabetic state in men and women may be different and this is not implemented in the present diagnosis, which is based on age, blood pressure, BMI and glucose levels.”

Professor Adamski said the research was just the “tip of the iceberg” as the researchers are now looking at ‘non-targeted’ metabolomics.

“We are approaching the whole metabolome and looking for differences … we think there are mechanisms that are based on regulation and not the presence of a gene.

“This is a completely new idea. We need [to study at least] two to three thousand metabolites to see what is going on,” Professor Adamski claimed.