Jayden Lee, EMBA, PharmD, BCACP & Zachary S. Brooks, PhD, EMBA
What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the word “pharmacogenomics”? What is the purpose of most pharmacogenomic research?
If you think about how your body processes the medications you take, you’re on the right track. If you think back
to Newton’s first law of physics: “an object at rest stays at rest, unless acted upon.” Your body similarly only needs medication
correction when acted upon, but more like chemistry, it’s the reaction that counts. Pharmacogenomics deals with the role of the genome in drug responses, how a person’s genetic makeup can affect their response to medications, and how to optimize
medication therapy for the individuals.
Medication(s) or drug(s) responses may be easy to understand if you have had a bad reaction to a medication. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), antibiotics cause some of the highest cases of adverse drug events (ADEs), responsible for 16% of emergency department (ED) visits and accounting for 200,000 ED visits annually (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2023). One of the goals of pharmacogenomics is to identify individuals at a higher risk of ADE based on their genetic makeup and find safer alternatives. Pharmacogenomics can guide clinicians to choose safer medications for the individuals and thus prevent ADEs (Swen, van der Wouden, Manson, et al., 2023).
The other side of the coin is that some medications simply do not work for some people because of the genetic variations. There are several reasons why a medication does not work for you, meaning the medication is not exerting the intended effects, and one of the reasons is genetic (Lacombe, 1996). Some people may metabolize a medication too fast. This means that the medication is not achieving adequate level in the body.3 In this case, the individuals may need a higher dose of the medication or look for an alternative.
#ugenome, #ugenomeai, #genetics, #pharmacogenetics, #genomicmedicine, #sequencing, #datascience, #lifesciences, #bioinformatics, #biostatistics, #pharma, #bullpen, #NVIDIAInception, #foundershub
Learn more about UGenome’s Personalized Medication Service, ProPEx, or contact UGenome. You can also find case studies for UGenome’s bioinformatics services Metabolite Identification, Bone Metastasis Risk Analysis in Breast Cancer, Survival Analysis with gene signatures in cancer