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UB Expert

William J. Jusko

Expertise:

• Drug interactions
• The principles of pharmacokinetics and drug metabolism and their application to specific patient populations

Jusko been a key contributor to the understanding of theophylline, a bronchodilator used to treat asthma, and methylprednisolone and other corticosteroids. For the past 25 years, has been continuously funded on the same National Institutes of Health grant to study the complex effects that occur after exposure to a drug.

Leads a group at UB that has been at the forefront of quantifying and predicting the complex effects of drugs. The team goes a critical step further than most pharmacologic researchers, taking the results of basic and clinical pharmacologic studies and then putting them into sophisticated mathematical models to quantify what happens at the whole-body, tissue, molecular and gene levels at different time intervals after a drug is administered. The team has compiled a database of what is probably the world's largest in vivo time series of gene-mediated effects that result from exposure to steroids under different dosing regimens. This wealth of data provides the researchers with the most complete picture of what the drug is doing to the body at the level of genomic changes. The researchers found in animal studies that there is a "severe" tolerance to steroids that occurs soon after their initial use that blunts the effects of the drugs. In the January 2001 issue of The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, they reported that rats that were administered methylprednisolone on a chronic basis significantly decreased their synthesis of receptors that bind the drug and alter the expression of genes.