Mary Relling, PharmD
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
Mary Relling says the best things about attending The University of Arizona College of Pharmacy were Mexican food on 6th Avenue and pharmacokinetics.
“Mike Mayersohn, Bill Jones and Mike Katz,” she says, naming professors who made her experience great. “I enjoyed pharmacokinetics so much that I went back to sit in on classes after I graduated.”
Relling graduated with a bachelor of science in pharmacy from UA in 1982. She received her PharmD from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, in 1985. After graduating she did a research fellowship at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee until 1987.
“I had never been any place that combined laboratory research with patient care as extensively as did St. Jude,” she says.
It’s no wonder she returned to St. Jude in 1988 after a research fellowship at the University of Basel in Switzerland.
Today Relling is chair of St. Jude’s pharmaceutical department. She says she loves patient care and is an advocate of genetic testing before prescribing drugs.
In a recent New York Times interview, Relling explained how genetic testing is a controversial issue right now, but she’s seen it work at St. Jude’s in the form of customized dosing.
“Till now, there’s been a one-size-fits-all approach,” she said in the Times interview. “In most cases, an average dose of medication is ordered, and then, if the patient suffers side effects, the dosage is adjusted. With gene testing, we can customize the prescription.”
Relling’s current research deals with finding genetic variations to predict drug-induced second cancers, osteonecrosis and neurotoxicity in children.
She thinks it will still be 10 years before genetic testing is widely used in prescribing.
“We need to do more research,” she says. “We should require DNA collection for all patients enrolled in clinical trials. There are still many trials were DNA is not available for study of why unanticipated things happen—-it is really inexcusable.”
Although she gets motion sickness when traveling, the Phoenix native has gone to Washington, Chicago and places around the U.S. to promote genetic testing. She says the most remote place she’s ever been to for that purpose is Hobart, Tasmania.
When she’s not working, Mary Relling enjoys ballroom dancing, swimming, reading and gardening.