Unpredictable adverse drug reactions are non-dose-related reactions that appear only in susceptible individuals. Their biological basis remains a puzzle.
Here we introduce the reader to systems biology using adverse drug reactions, specifically hypersensitivity reactions to multiple NSAIDs, as a model. In order to disentangle the different processes that contribute to these reactions –from drug intake to the appearance of symptoms– it will be necessary to create more high-throughput datasets. Just as crucial as the generation of data will be the use of systems biology techniques to integrate and make sense of it.
We review previous work that has used systems biology to study related pathologies such as asthma and allergy and the metabolism of NSAIDs. We show examples of how they could be applied to NSAIDs-hypersensitivity reactions using currently available datasets. We also describe breakthroughs in high-throughput technologies such as next generation sequencing and speculate on how they could be used to improve our understanding of this and related drug-induced pathologies.
