The 75-Year Anniversary of the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at Karolinska Institutet-Examples of Recent Accomplishments and Future Perspectives.

Karolinska Institutet is a medical university encompassing 21 departments distributed across three departmental or campus groups. Pharmacological research has a long and successful tradition at the institute with a multitude of seminal findings in the areas of neuronal control of vasodilatation, cardiovascular pharmacology, neuropsychopharmacology, receptor pharmacology, and pharmacogenomics that resulted in, among many other recognitions, two Nobel prizes in Physiology and Medicine, one in 1970 to Ulf von Euler for his discovery of the processes involved in storage, release, and inactivation of neurotransmitters and the other in 1982 to Sune Bergström and Bengt Samuelsson for their work on prostaglandins and the discovery of leukotrienes. Pharmacology at Karolinska Institutet has over the last decade been ranked globally among the top 10 according to the QS World University Ranking.

Pharmacogenetic Variants and Plasma Concentrations of Antiseizure Drugs: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.

Importance: Precise estimation of a patient's drug metabolism capacity is important for antiseizure dose personalization.

Objective: To quantify the differences in plasma concentrations for antiseizure drugs associated with variants of genes encoding drug metabolizing enzymes.

Data Sources: PubMed, Clinicaltrialsregister.

Impact of CYP2D6*2, CYP2D6*35, rs5758550, and related haplotypes on risperidone clearance in vivo.

Purpose: The CYP2D6 gene exhibits significant polymorphism, contributing to variability in responses to drugs metabolized by CYP2D6. While CYP2D6*2 and CYP2D6*35 are presently designated as alleles encoding normal metabolism, this classification is based on moderate level evidence. Additionally, the role of the formerly called "enhancer" single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs5758550 is unclear.