What is Pharmacogenomics?

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Did your friend's medication help her but gave you an adverse reaction?
Have you ever wondered why some people are allergic to penicillin while others are not?
Isn't it depressing that a fluke death during clinical trials might doom a new medication that might otherwise help thousands or even millions of other, truly needy patients?

The emerging science of pharmacogenomics should provide some help for the above dilemmas. By correlating an individual's gene profile with a prospective treatment regimen, it will eventually be possible to predict adverse reactions, adjust drug dosages, and select the most promising treatment course when several possibilities are available.

Even more startling, abandoned medicines that failed clinical trials might be restored as safe, more effective alternatives if we learn how to select appropriate patient sub-populations, again by learning in detail how we differ from one another in subtle ways.

Will we need to repeat the massive human genome project for each individual? No, that level of detail will probably not be necessary. In contrast to the number of bases in our genetic code (6 billion) or even larger number of cells in a human body (60 trillion), the number of proteins in each of us is a far more modest number, probably 35,000 or so.

And most of those are less important in surveying our differences, or at least those differences that are important when analyzing each patient's metabolic profile.

So by using large arrays of miniaturized tests called biochips, we will eventually have at least a "yes or no" response for the presence of several thousand key proteins and enzymes. In many cases these will be mutants (usually referred to as "SNPs" (snips) or single-nucleotide polymorphisms). So far about 1 million human SNPs have been catalogued. This information can then be used to predict our likely response to an intended drug or treatment protocol, or at the very least be used retrospectively to see patterns of reactions from the decades of results gleaned from patients who have already taken (or abandoned) medicines over their lifetimes.

This correlation of pharmaceutical sciences with the human genome thus has given rise to the promising new field of pharmacogenomics. With it chemists will be able to design better drugs more quickly, biochemists and pharmacologists will be able to interpret their biological assays more meaningfully, and clinicians will prescribe medications that are safer and more effective.

We invite you to join the work of the Institute for Molecular Diversity and Drug Design or our sister group, the Center for Genetics and Molecular Medicine as we seek to contribute to each of the above areas.