Welcome to Genes and Drugs
“Genes and Drugs” is a place for physicians and others learn more about how a person’s genetic makeup can affect his or her response to a particular medication–the field of pharmacogenetics or pharmacogenomics. For several dozen medications, there already exist tests that can help predict how a particular patient will respond to a specific drug. These tests have yet to have widespread adoption, but is inevitable that they will find their way into our clinical practice.
Your moderator here, is Alan Eshleman, MD, otherwise known as doctore. I’m neither a geneticist nor pharmacologist. Instead, I’m a board certified general internist with an abiding interest in how new science can affect the social, ethical, and economic aspects of medical practice. I welcome you all.
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July 20th, 2006 at 11:34 am
A good place to about pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics is in the New England Journal of Medicine 2002-3 series genetic medicine.
The NEJM Web site offers the full text at no charge.
July 20th, 2006 at 11:55 am
Many publications about genetic medicine use the terms Pharmocogenetics (PGX) and Pharmacogenomics–sometimes interchangably. What’s the Difference?
The short answer is that not everyone agrees on the distinction.
PGX came first and is generally understood to be the branch of pharmacology that studies individual genetically defined or modified responses to medications. The methodology of PGX is to look at phenotypic responses to medication and then attempt to determine what gene or genes may be responsible
Pharmacogenomics takes advantage of the fact that the entire human genome has now been sequenced. Pharmacogenomics looks at entire DNA sequences and attempts to identify those sequences that may influence drug metabolism.
In genetic terms, PGX research reasons from phenotype to genotype, while pharmacogenetics reasons from genotype to phenotype.
July 21st, 2006 at 10:22 am
Great to see you’ve got the blog up and running! I hope you find blogging as gratifying as many of your other writing endeavors. Good luck!