Liverpool University Drug Interaction website recognised for global impact on research and care
26 November 2024. Related: Conference reports, PK and drug interactions, Treatment advocacy, HIV 17 Glasgow 2024.
Simon Collins, HIV i-Base
This year the Glasgow Congress included the distinction of an official visit from the Princess Royal, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Liverpool University Drug Interaction website and its unique contribution to global health.
Professor David Back and Professor Saye Khoo meeting the Princess Royal in Glasgow
The website was formally launched in 1999 when the expanding complexity of many early HIV combinations included a bewildering range of potential drug interactions with only a limited number of formal interaction studies.
Professor David Back worked with Professor Saye Khoo and a close group of key colleagues and staff to create early drug interaction resources based on a traffic light code, to guide HIV doctors and pharmacists on potential cautions. The international importance of their early guidelines developed into an open access website, which was quickly recognised as a world class resource – something that has continued to be true for the last 25 years.
Professor Back summarised the history as one of the most important outcomes of his 40-year service at Liverpool University. As the service steadily grew, the website became fully interactive and app versions were developed. The online databases further expanded to first include hepatitis drugs in 2011 and interactions with treatments for COVID-19 in 2020, all evidence-based and updated, with translations into Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese.
The website currently covers more than 47,163 interactions between 43 HIV drugs and 1098 comedications. It also includes an additional 27,405 interactions between 27 hepatitis drugs and 1,016 comedications, plus over 30,742 interactions between 28 drugs to treat COVID-19 and 1100 comedications.
This is also a constantly updated resource with upwards of 100 interactions each month either added or revised as new research becomes available.
The site responds to more than a million interaction enquiries every month, from more than 130,000 individual users in more than 200 countries and territories.
Each interaction continues to be categorised using the simplified traffic light code and includes detailed information on exact or predicted interactions with guidance on how this should be managed on an individual patient level. Each report can cover multiple interactions and can be downloaded as an individualised PDF file.
Speaking about the decision to include COVID-19 drugs, Saye Khoo spoke movingly of how working on the wards in 2020 were “a microcosm of all the sadness in the world” but how the team’s concern about potential harm from interactions with untested drugs led to extending to work with international colleagues to rapidly launch the COVID-19 database within a week. Last year, this service reported on more than eight million global enquiries, always stressing that this has been thanks to a close and committed team. He also challenged young researchers to “dare to make a difference”.
Professor Chloe Orkin, co-chair of the Glasgow Conference this year, and an independent researcher with an impeccable history of community-based research, paid tribute to the encyclopaedic database which has supported clinicians and researchers globally, using a format that has been equally accessible and used by people living with HIV, facilitating safe practice and understanding of the use of drugs. Professor Orkin justly noted that Professor David Back and Professor Saye Khoo are “not only brilliant visionary scientists, but also that they are some of the kindest, most generous and wonderful people in the field and that this recognition is richly deserved”.
The Princess Royal spoke about the continued expertise, persistence and commitment at Liverpool which have helped so many people.
In 2007 Professor David Back was awarded the Lilly Prize from the British Pharmacological Society for outstanding contribution to Clinical Pharmacology and in 2015 a Lifetime achievement award from the European AIDS Clinical Society (EACS).
In 2024 Professor Saye Khoo was awarded an MBE for services to Infectious Diseases and Pharmacology.
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i-Base would like to congratulate David, Saye and the Liverpool team for this well-deserved recognition, as together with many other organisations we have relied on the Liverpool services, also valuing their close support of community projects.
They developed close community links, listening to broad concerns from many organisations to develop the first resources with detailed information about hormonal contraceptives, recreational and illegal drugs, herbal supplements and gender affirming hormones.
This is perhaps a good time to mention two personal examples in appreciation of this well-deserved honour.
Professor Back was one of the early supporters of peer education in the UK and he trained community advocates at AIDS Treatment Project in the late 90s and this developed into a long and close collaboration with HIV i-Base since. These evening workshops were usually after David had spent a day of meetings in London, still finding time to explain pharmacology to people living with HIV, before eventually catching a very late train back to Liverpool.
Similarly supportive, in the rare cases when information wasn’t included in the Liverpool database, there were many times when Saye Khoo would promptly return an email to summarise any theoretical concern. He once noted that he was actually in the middle of the Malaysian rainforest but quickly replying would probably be okay “so long as he was careful that his family didn’t see.”
As with many others, i-Base thanks the Liverpool team for having such a unique impact over so many years.
References
- Glasgow HIV Congress. Celebrating 25 years of the work of the Liverpool DDI Team. 12 November 2024.
https://virtual.hivglasgow.org/programme/clinical-case-study-session - HIV drug interaction checker.
https://www.hiv-druginteractions.org/checker - Hepatitis drug interaction checker.
https://www.hep-druginteractions.org - COVID-19 drug interaction checker.
https://covid19-druginteractions.org - Health expert honoured for HIV research (30 October 2015).
https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2015/10/30/health-expert-honoured-for-hiv-research/ - University’s Professor Saye Khoo receives MBE (23 April 2024).
https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2024/04/23/universitys-professor-saye-khoo-receives-mbe/
This report was first published on 14 November 2024.