Special Section on New Era of Transporter Science: Unraveling the Functional Role of Orphan Transporters–Editorial

Membrane transporters play a major role in human physiology and in drug disposition and response.In 1997, Dr. Giacomini's laboratory cloned and characterized the first human polyspecific organic cation transporter from liver (Zhang et al., 1997), which was almost simultaneously cloned in another laboratory (Gorboulev et al., 1997), and discovered that variants in the gene were associated with the disposition of and response to the antidiabetic drug metformin (Shu et al., 2007).Recently, her group unraveled the functional role of the orphan solute carrier (SLC) 22A24, an anion exchanger that preferentially transports steroid glucuronide conjugates (Yee et al., 2019).Dr. Giacomini trained over 35 graduate students and 30 postdoctoral fellows with many of those trainees becoming national and international leaders in the pharmaceutical sciences.Dr. Sook Wah Yee was a postdoctoral fellow under Dr. Giacomini and is currently a UCSF assistant adjunct professor conducting research on transporters using metabolomic and genome-wide association methodologies.In this issue of DMD, Dr. Yee, along with Dr. Giacomini, contributes the comprehensive review, "Emerging Roles of the Human Solute Carrier 22 Family" (Yee and Giacomini, 2022), which summarizes the physiologic and pharmacologic roles of SLC22 family members and the impact of genetic variants in these transporters on disease and drug response.Recent studies deorphaning SLC22 family members are also discussed.Dr.