The National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health recently established a collaborative group of scientists, called the Pharmacogenetics Research Network. Central to the network is a shared, state-of-the-art data repository, the Pharmacogenetics Knowledge Base (PharmGKB), which is housed at Stanford University. Network investigators deposit pharmacogenetic d...

Pharmacogenetics blends important components of the disciplines of genetics and pharmacology, and aims to describe the influence of inheritance on variable drug response. This review provides an overview of the history and current status of pharmacogenetics. The role of genetics in variable drug response is now firmly established. To apply this information to the clinical setting, more sophisti...

There is considerable interindividual variation in the response to antiplatelet and anticoagulant therapies. It has been proposed that this variability in drug response may be attributable to genetic variants. Thus, pharmacogenetics may help to accurately predict response to cardiovascular disease (CVD) therapies in order to maximize drug efficacy, minimize drug toxicity, and to tailor personal...

OBJECTIVE To study the performance of pharmacogenetics-based warfarin dosing algorithms in the initial and the stable warfarin treatment phases in a cohort of Han-Chinese patients undertaking mechanic heart valve replacement. METHODS We searched PubMed, Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure and Wanfang databases for selecting pharmacogenetics-based warfarin dosing models. Patients with me...

A key challenge for pharmacogenetics is the creation of databases to store, analyse and disseminate important datasets in order to catalyse research and training. Most successful databases have a limited scope: Genbank contains DNA sequences [1]; the Protein Data Bank contains the three-dimensional coordinates of macromolecules [2]; the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man contains a record of h...

Pharmacogenetics is one of the first clinical applications of the postgenomic era; it studies the role of heritability of drug responses. It promises personalised medicine rather than the established ‘one size fits all’ approach to drugs and dosages. This should ultimately lead to more efficient and safer drug therapy. In recent years, pharmacogenetic information has been included in drug label...

Drug bioavailability may vary greatly amongst individuals, affecting both efficacy and toxicity: in humans, genetic variations account for a relevant proportion of such variability. In the last decade the use of pharmacogenetics in clinical practice, as a tool to individualize treatment, has shown a different degree of diffusion in various clinical fields. In the field of infectious diseases, s...