Pharmacogenetics : the path to personalized prescribing

Abstract

The fact that different patients may show dissimilar responses to the same drug, has been recognised for several years, and many variables, such as age, gender and body weight have been identified to contribute to this observation. The last half century has seen a rise in research concerning a new variable – genetic variation – which has been recognised to offer a major contribution to this phenomenon. Pharmacogenetics research has today established itself as an important arm of pharmacology, and has key applications in drug development and clinical therapeutics. The advent of high throughput methodologies coupled with new data derived from the human genome sequencing project, has helped to powerfully mobilise the developmental pace of this research work, and to introduce the concept of genome-wide pharmacogenetic studies, or pharmacogenomics. The eventual development of pharmacogenetic tests, able to identify patients who are most likely to adequately respond to specific therapies from those who are not, will be a landmark in the history of therapeutics, and coupled to the development of new drugs for specific pharmacogenetically-stratified patient populations, will provide a markedly enhanced toolkit for the optimization of the benefit-risk ratio in prescribing.