Pharmacogenomics lurches forward; small battles push toward making personalized medicine a reality.(Research)

Medicinal drugs save patients, but compounds fail in many cases and even cause death in others. According to the US Food & Drug Administration's Center for Education and Research on Therapeutics, adverse drug reactions kill 100,000 Americans each year, registering as the fourth leading cause of death. (1) In the United States at least, prescribed drugs are more lethal than AIDS or automobile accidents. The problem is, no physician can know for certain how a patient will respond to a drug. Pharmacogenomics, however, could help alleviate that problem.

Applying genomic information to pharmacology may reveal how a specific drug will work in a specific patient. In the most far-blown visions of the future, genomic screening will be done alongside all diagnoses, providing a personalized patient profile and indicating which drugs will have the best probability of working or causing harm. Although not new on the single-gene scale, broader gene-expression profiling studies are beginning to enter clinical trials. Some of the information collected may even feed back into better treatments.

SINGLE-GENE SENSATION Although much of the hype for so-called personalized medicine began as the human genome sequence came within reach, pharmacogenomics actually preceded sequencing efforts. Richard Weinshilboum, professor in the departments of molecular pharmacology and experimental therapeutics and medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., says, "There is some lack of appreciation that pharmacogenomic concepts date back to mid-20th century." In the late …