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This article originally appeared on Undark.
When chatting at cocktail parties about his job, Mark Ratain, an oncologist and pharmacologist at the University of Chicago, often asks a short riddle: Your doctor gives you a prescription for a new drug. The pharmacist says, Make sure you take it on an empty stomach, twice a day. What do you think would happen if you took it with food?
Most don t get the answer right. Nobody would ever say, Well, I could die from an overdose, Ratain says.
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That s exactly what could happen to anyone taking the drug nilotinib approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2007 to treat the blood cancer chronic myelogenous leukemia. The drug is among the most effective cancer therapies; a patient taking it may have a 96 percent chance of surviving the cancer for at least six years, according to one of the most recent long-term studies. But the FDA-approved label for nilotinib carries a black box warning: Take it on an empty s