What is pharmacogenomics?
Pharmacogenomics uses information about a person’s genetic makeup, or genome, to choose the drugs and drug doses that are likely to work best for that particular person. This new field combines the science of how drugs work, called pharmacology, with the science of the human genome, called genomics.
What might pharmacogenomics mean for you?
Until recently, drugs have been developed with the idea that each drug works pretty much the same in everybody. But genomic research has changed that “one size fits all” approach and opened the door to more personalized approaches to using and developing drugs.
Depending on your genetic makeup, some drugs may work more or less effectively for you than they do in other people. Likewise, some drugs may produce more or fewer side effects in you than in someone else. In the near future, doctors will be able to routinely use information about your genetic makeup to choose those drugs and drug doses that offer the greatest chance of helping you.
Pharmacogenomics may also help to save you time and money. By using information about your genetic makeup, doctors soon may be able to avoid the trial-and-error approach of giving you various drugs that are not likely to work for you until they find the right one. Using pharmacogenomics, the “best-fit” drug to help you can be chosen from the beginning.
How is pharmacogenomic information being used today?
Doctors are starting to use pharmacogenomic information to prescribe drugs, but such tests are routine for only a few health problems. However, given the field’s rapid growth, pharmacogenomics is soon expected to lead to better ways of using drugs to manage heart disease, cancer, asthma, depression and many other common diseases.
One current use of pharmacogenomics involves people infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Before prescribing the antiviral drug abacavir (Ziagen), doctors now routinely test HIV-infected patients for a genetic variant that makes them more likely to have a bad reaction to the drug.
Another example is the breast cancer drug trastuzumab (Herceptin). This therapy works only for women whose tumors have a particular genetic profile that leads to overproduction of a protein called HER2.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) also recommends genetic testing before giving the chemotherapy drug mercaptopurine (Purinethol) to patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Some people have a genetic variant that interferes with their ability to process the drug. This processing problem can cause severe side effects and increase risk of infection, unless the standard dose is adjusted according to the patient’s genetic makeup.
The FDA also advises doctors to test colon cancer patients for certain genetic variants before administering irinotecan (Camptosar), which is part of a combination chemotherapy regimen. The reasoning is that patients with one particular variant may not be able to clear the drug from their bodies as quickly as others, resulting in severe diarrhea and increased infection risk. Such patients may need to receive lower doses of the drug. Read more at genome.gov
Where Can I Find More Information About Pharmacogenomics?
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