Pharmacogenes (PGx-genes): Current understanding and future directions

Abstract

Individual specific variable drug response against similar drugs raises a significant challenge for the effective and safe treatment of many human diseases. Pharmacogenomics is the branch which try to deal with these challenge by relating drug response to patient specific genome in order to better customize patient treatments. Pharmacogenomics based research focus on the whole genome, but since last few years after realizing the importance, it mainly centralized towards genes of pharmacological importance called pharmacogenes, and try to explore association between their variants and variable drug response in world's different population. This research was initiated with the resulted data from human genome based research projects and later on assisted by exome sequencing projects. Simultaneously, it was boost-up with the participation of various pharmacogenomics groups lead by PGRN. By realizing the significance of pharmacogenes, and their variant related information, in health science, scientific communities are already started to look for genes of pharmacogenomics importance with different aspect. This article aims to provide an inclusive insight on current state of knowledge of pharmacogenes, recent trends and progress in the understanding of the pharmacogenes and the implications for personalized medicine.

Keywords: Adverse drug response; Drug; Pharmacogenes; Pharmacogenomics; Polymorphism; Variable drug response.