Leslie Z. Benet, PhD
Research Interests
My laboratory studies the interplay of enzymes and transporters in the liver and the intestine with respect to drug disposition. Recent work has shown that the inability to predict drug metabolism using isolated hepatic or intestinal microsomes is due to the fact that for many substrates, both uptake and efflux transporters control the access of substrates to these intracellular enzymes. Similarly, the inability to use allometric scaling across animal species to predict human drug metabolism is frequently due to a lack of knowledge about the differences in transporters between animals and man. Our group has found that transporter function greatly influences the disposition of a number of commonly used drugs (e.g., antibiotics, statins, hypoglycemic agents). We also study pharmacokinetics in human beings, particularly the disposition of immunosuppressive drugs in transplant recipients.
Selected Publications
- Lam JL, Okochi H, Huang Y, Benet LZ. In vitro and in vivo correlation of hepatic transporter effects on erythromycin metabolism: characterizing the importance of transporter-enzyme interplay. Drug Metab Dispos 2006;34:1336-44.
- Lam JL, Shugarts SB, Okochi H, Benet LZ. Elucidating the effect of final-day dosing of rifampin in induction studies on hepatic drug disposition and metabolism. J Pharmacol Exp Ther 2006;319:864-870
- Frassetto LA, Browne M, Cheng A, Wolfe AR, Roland ME, Stock PG, Carlson L, Benet LZ. Immunosuppressive Pharmacokinetics and Dosing Modifications in HIV-1 Infected Liver and Kidney Transplant Recipients. Amer J Transplant 2007;7:2816-2820.
- Custodio JM, Wu C-Y, Benet LZ. Predicting Drug Disposition, Absorption/Elimination/Transporter Interplay and the Role of Food on Drug Absorption. Adv Drug Deliv Rev 2008;60:717-733.
- Professor
- Biopharmaceutical Sciences and Pharmaceutical Chemistry
Research Theme
- Hepatic Physiology and Metabolism
Contact Information
- Leslie.benet@
ucsf.edu - Phone: (415) 476-3853
- Fax: (415) 476-8887
- 533 Parnassus Ave.
- Box 0912, U-68
- San Francisco, CA. 94143-0912
Other UCSF Affiliations
- PSPG graduate program