Pharmacogenomics - therapeutic and ethical issues

Abstract

Pharmacogenomics deals with the genetic basis underlying variable drug response in individual patients. It encompasses sum of all genes. Numerous genes may play a role in drug response and toxicity. The newly emerging genomic technologies enable the search for relevant genes and their variants to include the entire genome and help in the search for candidate genes. Moreover pharmacogenomic analysis can identify the disease susceptibility genes representing potential new drug targets. The current concept of drug therapy is to apply treatment for a large population group whereas application of pharmacogenomic will help individual application of drug therapy or on smaller patient sub population but whether this individualized medicine will lead to improved and economically feasible therapy is yet to be seen. This is again complicated by various ethical and legal issues. In this article some of the issues are highlighted.