The bitter taste of certain medications is a barrier to taking some medications as prescribed, especially for people who are particularly sensitive to the bitter taste. Published in Clinical therapeutics, a team at the Monell Chemical Senses Center found that the diabetes drug rosiglitazone could partially block the bitter taste of some especially bad-tasting medications. Rosiglitazone may be added in small doses to other medications to make them less bitter and taste better.
This result provided new information. “To our knowledge, there are no previous reports on the bitter taste blocking effect of this diabetes medication,” said first author Ha Nguyen, PhD, a Monell postdoctoral fellow. Rosiglitzone was identified as a potential bitter taste blocker through testing of human taste tissue cells. , a detection method developed by Monell and DiscoveryBiomed, Inc., now Eurofins.
The team conducted taste test experiments on research participants in the United States and Poland, and found that adding rosiglitazone to medications reduced bitterness for many, but not all, research participants.
“People differ, and we need to evaluate many types of people from different parts of the world to make sure efforts to reduce bitterness and make medications easier to take work well for all people,” said lead author Danielle Reed. , PhD, director of Monell. Scientific officer.
These results suggest that having more blockers to choose from will help completely suppress the bitterness of many types of medications for a wide range of populations and ancestries. Mixtures of several blockers can help achieve a low or no bitterness standard for even the most bitter-tasting medications.
“Although rosiglitazone was only partially effective as a bitter blocker in this study, modifying these drugs to improve potency, palatability and efficacy may allow us to find a better version of this drug,” Nguyen said. “Rosiglitazone is valuable as a bitter blocker because it is potentially effective in most people and is part of a class of drugs already approved worldwide to treat diabetes.”
Next steps in this line of research include a similar study measuring bitter blocking in several hundred African and Asian immigrants to increase the diversity of participants’ bitter taste ancestry.
This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (R42 DC017693), the Monell Chemical Senses Center Carol M. Christensen Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Human Chemosensory Sciences Fund, and Monell Chemical Senses Center institutional funds.