Pharmacogenetics for the prescriber

Pharmacogenetics is the study of how genetic factors affect the response to drugs (efficacy and toxicity). Variation in genes can affect either a drug's pharmacokinetics (how the drug is handled in the body) or its pharmacodynamics (how the drug interacts with proteins in the body to produce its effects). Such variation needs to be evaluated in combination with clinical and environmental factors in order to personalize either drug choice or drug dose in individual patients. There are some well-characterized examples of pharmacogenetic variation in clinical practice, and this is likely to increase as advances in both genotyping technologies and our understanding of the human genome increase. The challenge will be to translate these basic findings into clinical practice by generating evidence that shows that taking genetic variation into account when prescribing a drug leads to better clinical outcomes than the current standard practice.