Miaki Makiguchi is the Drug Metabolism and Disposition Highlighted Trainee Author for the July 2023 issue. She is currently a sixth-year undergraduate student at the Laboratory of Drug Metabolism and Pharmacology at Showa Pharmaceutical University, Tokyo, Japan, under the guidance of Prof. Hiroshi Yamazaki. The DMD article that earned her selection as a Highlighted Trainee Author is titled: “Variants of Flavin-containing Monooxygenase 3 (FMO3) Found in Subjects in an Updated Database of Genome Resources” and is available at: https://doi.org/10.1124/dmd.123.001310. 

Miaki mainly works on the functional analysis of human FMO3 variants in the mega-databases surveyed and in subjects found by urinary phenotyping for trimethylaminuria, a condition that results in an unpleasant fishy smell. The increasing availability of mega-databases and phenotype–gene analyses have revealed that impaired human FMO3 variants are associated with the metabolic disorder trimethylaminuria.

As an undergraduate student at Showa Pharmaceutical University, Miaki has been continuously working on identifying variants of the highly polymorphic human FMO3 gene and their catalytic efficiencies in collaboration with pediatricians and physicians, resulting in five publications from the laboratory. Individuals with FMO3 variants identified in a cohort may be susceptible to modified drug clearance and drug interactions.

The anticipated impact of Miaki’s current research, which revealed 20 nonsense or missense FMO3 variants (of the 47 FMO3 mutations identified here) that were newly identified as having moderately or severely impaired activities, is to facilitate easy detection in the clinical setting of FMO3 variants in subjects susceptible to low drug clearance possibly caused by impaired FMO3 function.

Outside her work, Miaki enjoys visiting museums and listening to music.