Hey all, welcome back to the Real Life Pharmacology podcast. I'm your host, pharmacist, Derek Christensen.

Thank you so much for listening today. Go check out Real Life Pharmacology.com. We've got a great PDF,

absolutely no cost to you. It's on the top 200 drugs. We lay out some mechanism of action stuff and some of the most important

clinical pearls you're going to need to know as a pharmacist, nurse, whoever's taking

pharmacology classes, for example. So go snag that for free at real-life pharmacology.com.

All right. So let's talk about the drug of the day today, and that is azithoprene.

Brand name of this medication is Imuram, and this medication serves to basically suppress the immune system.

Okay.

So from a mechanism of action standpoint, how does it do that?

And I'll talk a little bit about why we would want to do that coming up here.

This drug is metabolized into active metabolites.

Those metabolites can actually get placed or incorporated into the

DNA replication process and ultimately kind of mess up that DNA replication process and stop it

and prevent that cellular process from going further there.

So ultimately what this can do is cause issues with the immune system.

And we're trying to basically blunt the immune system. And we've talked about,

you know, several medications previously as to why we would want to do that. So classic examples

of disease states where we're going to use azateoprene, Crohn's disease, other autoimmune disorders,

lupus, like rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, and lastly, you may see it in transplantation.

So again, situations where we're trying to suppress the immune system and prevent rejection of an organ

transplant, for instance, there. So I will say azathoprene. I can't think of a disease

state where it's like absolutely the go-to agent, like you're going to use this absolutely first

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