rhesus_pieces

It also says that this is a PK (pharmacokinetics) study which means they are mainly looking at how the drug levels change in the body after it's given. Usually the PK portions of drug studies are done way after most of the riskier testing (i.e., safety, general/reproductive toxicology), which are done in animals. By the time any drug gets to human testing it's usually been well-investigated in animal models (mostly rodents but the FDA requires testing in two non-rodent species as well for approval).

The more you know!

You never really know how the feeding status will affect the metabolism of a drug, so that's probably why they had you fast. This is also part of why they instruct you to take a drug with or without food, or avoid certain foods when you are taking certain drugs. Everything interacts with everything else :) But thank you for volunteering for this study, it's an important part of drug development! Plus you got to beat it in the name of science.

I work with Cynos currently but used to work with Rhesus. (Neuroscience/biomedical research). My monkeys are considered pests in many areas of the world, but the apes are much more threatened by humans :(

I am in a tangentially related field, I love working with monkeys (I have real monkeys, not apes). Just wanted to say thanks for doing what you do! I would love to do what you do :)

No problem! It's pretty interesting, the PK portion is usually done by dosing the drug at a given time and then taking blood samples at predetermined intervals so they can analyze the sample to see how much drug is there as time goes on. The other side of it is called pharmacodynamics (PD; usually the whole bit is called PK/PD or DMPK for drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics) which looks at how your body breaks down the drug (so they could be looking for metabolites of the drug in the blood samples instead of the actual drug).