Wayne State University School of Medicine Professor of Pathology Martin Bluth, M.D., Ph.D., is spreading the word on the role of the laboratory in toxicology and drug testing with two recent outreach efforts aimed at the health care industry as a whole.

For physicians, a 49-minute webinar on the subject is available now through the Michigan State Medical Society website at https://www.msms.org/Education/On-Demand-Webinars, under the Pain and Symptom Management section, or directly here (registration required). The webinar is available 24 hours a day.

In addition, Dr. Bluth implored attendees of the World Drug Safety Congress meeting held May 3-4 in Philadelphia to consider the need to perform drug testing on clinical trial participants, conveying through a presentation and roundtable discussion the value of performing clinical laboratory drug and toxicology testing in clinical drug trials to determine what a clinical trial participant may additionally have in their system.

"I also stressed that many of the suspected side effects and adverse reactions may have very little to do with the actual trialed drug, but rather may be precipitated by the unknown agent - opiate, benzodiazepine, amphetamine, illicit or otherwise - ingested by the participant and not shared, intentionally or unintentionally, with the trial coordinators," he said. "While there may be reasons for ingested drug nondisclosure, such agents can clearly facilitate adverse reaction with the trialed drug by virtue of the undisclosed drug's inhibitor, potentiator, pharmacogenomic and /or intrinsic deleterious effects. As such, urine drug testing can provide objective ancillary information to help support drug trials for both patient safety as well as economic vantage points."

Dr. Bluth also participated in a panel on developing pragmatic measures for pharmaco-vigilance through patient-centeredness.
"We discussed incorporating patient-centered logic that already exists on this in the laboratory medicine world, including patient-accessible medical records, and direct-to-patient lab results and interpretation, into the domain of clinical trials," he said.

Congress participants included representatives from Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb, AstraZeneca and more. "I have begun discussing opportunities to incorporate drug testing in clinical trials with some of those in attendance," he said.

Dr. Bluth is chief medical officer of Consolidated Laboratory Management Systems and director of Pathology at Michigan Surgical Hospital in Warren.