Is that because of the vascularization of the lung tissue?
A. Yes. There’s only a very small distance, about a micrometer, that a drug has to travel to be absorbed in the lungs, as opposed to how far it has to go through the lining of the GI tract. There’s a huge surface area in the lung, and, again, it is highly vascularized. For all those reasons, drugs are absorbed very well from the lung. We’ve gotten some funding from pharmaceutical companies that are developing drugs for that purpose to look at whether FMO metabolizes certain drugs in the lungs. Q. How are drugs metabolized? A. Almost any chemical that gets into your body is metabolized before it’s excreted. Metabolism helps to make the compound more water soluble and easier to excrete in urine or feces. Often, a hydroxyl group will get attached to a molecule to make it a little more water soluble. After that, the compound may be sulfated as well. It becomes very water soluble because it’s got an added polar group and a charge as a result of these chemical modifications. Q. What drugs or
