Kamila Sadko Publishes Her First Paper Detailing Method for Predicting QT-Prolongation in Preclinical Studies
By Chuck Carlson
Kamila Sadko is following the ways of the heart in more ways than one.
There is the academic way, which she has been pursuing as a second-year student in MSU’s Pharmacology & Toxicology Department, where she is studying the cardiovascular system.
She recently published her first paper on how certain drugs impact the prolongation of the heart’s QT interval, which is a risk factor for the development of ventricular arrhythmia.
But she is also following her heart that helped her decide that science was her calling, thanks to her 94-year-old grandfather, Edward.
“He’s one of the reasons I’m in science,” she said. “And he’s so proud that I’m going to get a Ph.D. He keeps asking when I’m going to finish.”
Kamila was born in a tiny farming village in Poland called Podlesie Dębowe, home to maybe 60 souls. And though she moved to Chicago with her parents and siblings when she was just 4, she still recalls days with her grandfather when he’d peel fresh cucumbers from the garden, and they’d eat them together.
As a youth, Edward was bright and ambitious and had set his sights on becoming a chemist. But in 1930s Poland, as both Communism and Nazism were rising, those opportunities slipped away. He gave up that dream, remained (and still lives) in Poland, and worked in a paper mill.
Kamila eventually went to Drake University, where she had originally planned to train to be a pharmacist.
“But I got an opportunity to job shadow a pharmacist,” she said. “It wasn’t for me.”
She switched her focus and earned her BS in Clinical and Applied Health Sciences with a focus in Pharmacology and Toxicology and then enrolled in the Ph.D. program at Michigan State to continue her interest in PhmTox.
“I wanted to do Pharmacology and Toxicology in the Midwest,” she said. “I instantly knew I wanted to go to MSU. Everybody was so happy here. It was great. I knew right away.”
She joined Dr. Adam Lauver’s lab to study cardiovascular drugs and became especially interested in pharmacokinetics, the study of what the body does to the drugs it ingests and safety pharmacology.
“I kind of fell in love with it,” Kamila said. “I just really like numbers.”
Specifically, she has been studying the heart’s QT interval, the time between the Q and T waves of an electrocardiogram.
“It’s a biomarker,” Dr. Lauver said. “You can look at the QT interval to predict that the patient might develop an arrhythmia.”
It is long known that numerous drugs can impact the heart and the QT interval and that it can lead to the risk of arrhythmia (an irregular heartbeat), and her study focused on creating methods to better predict these changes preclinically.
“All these efforts have been put into identifying risky compounds earlier in the drug development process so you can avoid wasting time and money,” Dr. Lauver said.
Kamila has published her first paper detailing a method for predicting QT-prolongation in preclinical studies, using computational methods to maximize the use of data already collected in other studies.
“We’re using existing data sets from other studies,” she said, as many animal toxicology studies achieve drug blood concentrations higher than what people would normally reach in the clinic. Using this information, she can predict what might happen to humans at therapeutic doses.
Her focus now is shifting toward a potential new guidance from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which seeks to standardize the evaluation of drug effects on blood pressure. Elevated blood pressure is known to increase the risk of heart attack and stroke and, therefore, is an important consideration in risk assessment and product labeling.
“While most new drugs in development undergo some evaluation of their effects on blood pressure, the methods by which these studies are conducted are not consistent and sometimes not adequate,” Dr. Lauver said. “The goal of our work will be to identify best practices for the preclinical evaluation of blood pressure.”