Pharmacogenetics examines the genetic characteristics of individuals to understand variations in response to therapeutics. This approach has the potential to significantly affect the development of new medicines. The application of pharmacogenetic principles could yield significant time and resource savings within the drug development process. In preclinical drug development, pharmacogenetics c...

The Industry Pharmacogenomics Working Group has an interest in attaining a better understanding of global requirements for sample collections intended for pharmacogenetics research. To have adequately powered pharmacogenetics studies representative of the clinical trial population, it is important to collect DNA samples from a majority of consenting study participants under many institutional r...

Physicians have long puzzled over a well-known phenomenon: different patients respond differently to the same treatment. Although many explanations exist, pharmacogenetics has now captured the medical imagination. While this might seem part of the broader interest in all things genetic, the early history of pharmacogenetics reveals the specific factors that contributed to the emergence of genet...

Over the last decades important progress is being made regarding disease modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs), like methotrexate (MTX), in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Nevertheless, a substantial part of the patients fail to achieve a good response and/or experience toxicity, which limits further treatment leading to progression of inflammation and destruction of joints. These...

Different clinical response of different patients to the same medicine has been recognised and documented since the 1950's. Variability in response of individuals to standard doses of drug therapy is important in clinical practice and can lead to therapeutic failures or adverse drug reactions. Pharmacogenetics seeks to identify individual genetic differences (polymorphisms) in drug absorption, ...