A clinical pharmacologist's view of drug toxicity

1. Our ability to understand the basis of adverse drug reactions has improved progressively, and with it, the ability to prevent their occurrence; one aim of the clinical pharmacologist is to identify patients at special risk. 2. Four examples of clinical drug toxicity which illustrate how the subject has advanced over the past 20 years are described. These illustrate how a combination of clinical and laboratory medicine can be used to help our understanding of the basis of adverse drug reactions. With a fair degree of certainty one can also predict that advances in bioinformatics, genomics and combinatorial chemistry will progressively contribute to clinical toxicology in the future.