Pharmacogenetics, Pharmacogenomics, and Personalized Medicine

Although a person's environment, diet, and general state of health can all influence how he or she responds to medicines, another important factor is genes. Pharmacogenetics is the study of how your genes affect the way your body responds to a medicine. Pharmacogenetics helps to determine what the right medicine is for you, based on your own genes.

Pharmacogenetics provides information that may help:

• You receive better and safer drugs the first time.
• Your doctor provide you with a more appropriate dose.
• Improve disease screening.
• Prevent disease.

While one drug therapy may help most of a given patient population, some patients may fail to respond to the drug at all. In this same population, some individuals may suffer from adverse side effects, while others experience none. Pharmacogenetics is the study of these varying responses to drugs and the determination of the genetic mutations underlying these variations. Recent technological advances have fostered the progression of this field of research from Pharmacogenetics to Pharmacogenomics – the study of drug response in the context of the entire genome. With Pharmacogenomics, researchers are able to look at variations in all the genes in a group of individuals simultaneously to determine the basis for variations in drug response. With the knowledge that certain genetic changes result in alterations in patient responses to drugs, the hope is that doctors will be better able to make decisions about treatments for their patients. Personalized medicine is the use of knowledge about an individual patient's genetic make-up to influence the drugs and doses doctors choose for that patient.