What is Pharmacogenomic Testing?

PGx Medical
Metabolic Validation Program

“Pharmacogenetics (PGx), the study of variations of DNA and RNA characteristics as related to drug response, is one of the most exciting areas of personalized medicine today. The field arises from the convergence of advances in pharmacology (the science of drugs) and genomics (the study of genes and their functions).

Patients typically have variability in response to many drugs that are currently available. It can be difficult to predict who will benefit from a medication, who will not respond at all, and who will experience adverse effects. PGx seeks to understand how differences in genes and their expressions affect the body’s response to medications.
More specifically, PGx uses information (such as DNA sequence, gene expression, and copy number) for purposes of explaining inter individual differences in drug metabolism (pharmacokinetics) and physiological drug response (pharmacodynamics), identifying responders and non responders to a drug, and predicting the efficacy and/or toxicity of a drug.”  — Margaret A. Hamburg M.D. Commissioner of FDA