What is pharmacogenomics ?
Pharmacogenomics is the study of the influence of genetic factors on drug response. The goals of pharmacogenomic research are: a) to study the interactions between genetic factors and response to treatment and/or b) to identify new targets for treatments. For example, pharmacogenomics research may explore whether the presence of a particular version of a gene influences the effectiveness or the side effects of a given medication. Another example is a study that seeks to identify the genes involved in the response to medications. At this time in Canada, pharmacogenomic testing is not required for drug approval or in the prescription process. However, the development of practices involving the voluntary submission of pharmacogenomic information draws attention to the importance that such information could have in the future. Two terms are used by experts to describe this type of research: pharmacogenomics and pharmacogenetics.
Pharmacogenomics is the study of how an individual’s genetic inheritance affects the body’s response to drugs. The term comes from the words pharmacology and genomics and is thus the intersection of pharmaceuticals and genetics. Pharmacogenomics holds the promise that drugs might one day be tailor-made for individuals and adapted to each person’s own genetic makeup. Environment, diet, age, lifestyle, and state of health all can influence a person’s response to medicines, but understanding an individual’s genetic makeup is thought to be the key to creating personalized drugs with greater efficacy and safety. Pharmacogenomics combines traditional pharmaceutical sciences such as biochemistry with annotated knowledge of genes, proteins, and single nucleotide polymorphisms.
Pharmacogenomics is the application of genomic approaches and technologies to the identification of drug targets. Examples include trawling entire genomes for potential receptors by bioinformatics means, or by investigating patterns of gene expression in both pathogens and hosts during infection, or by examining the characteristic expression patterns found in tumours or patients samples for diagnostic purposes (possibly in the pursuit of potential cancer therapy targets). The term “pharmacogenomics” is used for the more “trivial”—but arguably more useful—application of bioinformatics approaches to the cataloguing and processing of information relating to pharmacology and genetics, for example the accumulation of information in databases like this one. (Thanks to Ivanovi.
