Journal of Drug Metabolism & Toxicology
Open Access

Leeder JS

Biography

Dr. Leeder is currently the Marion Merrell Dow/Missouri Endowed Chair in Pediatric Clinical Pharmacology and Director of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutic Innovation at Children’s Mercy. He holds professorial appointments at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, University of Kansas (Lawrence, KS) in Pharmaceutical Chemistry and the University of Kansas Medical Center (Kansas City, KS) in Pharmacology, Toxicology and Therapeutics. Dr. Leeder’s service to the discipline of Clinical Pharmacology includes past memberships as Chair of the Drug Metabolism Division of the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET) and Treasurer of the Drug Metabolism Section of the International Union of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology (IUPHAR). Over the past 30 years, Dr. Leeder’s research has produced over 160 peer-reviewed publications which include highly cited reviews on the application of pharmacogenetic and pharmacogenomic strategies to observe variability in drug disposition and response in children. He has received continuous research support from the Medical Research Council of Canada and NIH since 1993 

Research Interest

Special Interests: Pediatric clinical pharmacology, pediatric pharmacogenetics, developmental pharmacogenomics

My research interests focus on understanding the relative contributions of genetic variation and ontogeny to observed variability in drug disposition and response in children. Of particular interest are the changes in drug metabolizing enzyme activities that occur as children mature, the regulatory mechanisms that underlie those developmental changes and the consequences of the developmental changes on drug efficacy and toxicity in children. For example, urine samples have been obtained from epileptic children being treated with carbamazepine and valproic acid to characterize the relative abundance of metabolites reflecting the activity of competing bioactivation and detoxification pathways, and to determine how these markers change as children grow and develop. DNA samples from the extremes of the population distributions are utilized to search for gene variants that contribute to the observed variability. The goal is to identify critical periods of increased bioactivation (potential vulnerability to idiosyncratic adverse drug reactions) to be identified for subsequent prospective investigations. The pharmacogenetic and -genomic approaches resident within My group provides a rich environment for graduate students to translate their accumulating basic science expertise to clinically important problems

 

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