Pharmacogenomics

Pharmacogenomics is a branch of pharmaceutics which covers the influence of how genetic variation can affect drug responses in humans by correlating the drug's efficacy and toxicity with gene expression or single-nucleotide polymorphisms. The aim of this is to help researchers develop a comprehensive way of optimizing the use of drug therapy to ensure that it is prescribed in the most effective manner, to maximize its effects and also minimize any adverse reactions.

To achieve the best possible drug therapy—some have referred to it as personalized medicine—re-searchers have had to tabulate the effect of each drug against the genotype of each person being prescribed that drug.

With genes from people differing slightly in their nucleotide (DNA base) content, this process is obviously extremely time-consuming, and expensive in terms of resources. As a result it is initially used to deal with drugs which generally have highly toxic effects and/or are also very expensive. With a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1998 that four years earlier that there were some 2.2 million serious adverse drug reactions in the United States, accounting for up to 100,000 deaths. This undoubtedly means that pharmacogenomics will be important in the years to come at reducing this toll, and ensuring medication is more appropriate to the individual patients.