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Have you ever experienced medication side effects? Unfavorable drug reactions are a worry for all clinicians who prescribe medications to treat adults and children, but genomics can play a role in reducing the number of negative side effects for some medications. Scientists now know to look for genetic variation that can explain why different people may respond very differently to the same drug. As medical practitioners have learned more about the human genome, a new field has developed called pharmacogenomics. Simply put, this means using genomics to get "the right dose of the right drug to the right patient at the right time." Using genetic tests, physicians can better separate individuals who may be harmed by certain drugs from those who may benefit from them.

Imagine this scenario...

Your doctor sequences your genome to decide how to treat your high cholesterol. She might find a variant indicating that a commonly used drug would have little effect on reducing your cholesterol levels, but it would increase your risk of heart attack or stroke. Luckily, you would not be given that commonly used drug due to this genomic information. Instead, another drug would be provided to you that lowers your cholesterol without negative side effects.

Using genomics to get "the right dose of the right drug to the right patient at the right time.

This is not a far-fetched scenario. Take, for instance, Ziagen® or abacavir, a commonly prescribed drug therapy for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. When first used, some patients developed severe rashes, fatigue, and diarrhea - symptoms of a possible immune system reaction. Scientists looked at genomic variants associated with the immune system and finally identified one - called HLA-B*5701 - that causes the overreaction. Now doctors routinely test for the variant to find out who should avoid the drug.

Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires pharmacogenomic information to appear on the labels of 106 medications that are currently on the market. Before the Human Genome Project started, only four drugs carried such a label. As DNA sequencing costs decline and our knowledge increases, tailoring drugs to your genomic profile will become even more common in medical practice.
Resources

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national human genome research institute

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Have you ever experienced medication side effects? Unfavorable drug reactions are a worry for all clinicians who prescribe medications to treat adults and children, but genomics can play a role in reducing the number of negative side effects for some medications.

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Advancing the Science - Pharmacogenomics

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Advancing the Science - Pharmacogenomics

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This video details how Pharmacogenomics are being used to personalize healthcare for patients.

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Advancing the Science - Pharmacogenomics

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Richard Weinshilboum, M.D., director of the Pharmacogenomics Program in the Center for Individualized Medicine at Mayo Clinic explains how Pharmacogenomics works to bringing the right drug, to the right person and the right time, by individualizing health care based on genomics.

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Pharmacogenetics, also called pharmacogenomics, is the study of how genetic variability causes different responses in people to medications. When patients need them, doctors will prescribe different drugs for various ailments. Dosages are based on a patient's metabolic response.  Pharmacogenetic tests look for genetic variants that are associated with variable response to specific medications. Adverse drug reactions are a significant cause of hospitalizations and deaths in the United States. Researchers are learning how inherited differences in genes affect the body’s response to medications and this will allow them to predict a medication's effect on certain people. Pharmacogenomics will allow the treatment of life threatening diseases like aids and alzheimer's.

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1.) Everyone has a different metabolic response to medicines.
2.) Therapeutic drug monitoring is used to determine what a patient can handle.
3.)   If an individual has a nucleotide that is different from "wild type" in one copy of their genes, that person is said to have a heterozygous variant and one is a homozygous variant.
4.) Most mutations are benign.
5.) The field of study is still very new.
6.) Many drugs are not one size fits all for people.
7.) Doctors will be able to use information about your genetic makeup to choose drugs doses that offer the greatest chance of helping you.
8.) Clinical factors affect a diagnosis and this is a what genomics is used for.
9.)