Personalized Medicine and Pharmacogenetics
Personalized Medicine
Personalized medicine is the tailoring of medical treatment to the individual characteristics of each patient. Personalized medicine is now possible because sophisticated molecular and informatics tools are available to physicians to individualize patient treatment. New methods to select drugs or treatments tailored to each patient make better treatment outcomes possible with fewer adverse reactions to treatment. Personalizing treatment represents a substantial shift in medical practice from what worked for a "typical" patient to what now works for each "individual" patient.
Pharmacogenetics
The term pharmacogenetics refers to the study of how genes affect the way a patient responds to medication. Genetic differences can influence the efficacy of medications, can be the source of serious drug side-effects, and increase the risk of drug-to-drug interactions. By having an evidence-based report of a patient's genetic drug suitability profile, a clinician can better understand how their specific patients may react to a medication.
Two concepts serve as the backbone of pharmacogenetics. The first is pharmacokinetics, which can be defined generally as the study of how the body metabolizes a drug. Each drug has its own unique metabolic profile, meaning each drug has a specific set of enzymes responsible for catalyzing the absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME) of a medication.
Numerous genetic variants affect how much of these enzymes an individual can produce. Having too little enzyme can cause a drug to build up in a patient's system and result in adverse drug reactions (ADRs). Producing too much of an enzyme may cause the patient's body to excrete a medication too quickly, preventing the drug from ever reaching optimal therapeutic levels. The amount of enzyme available for each individual can be predicted through genetic testing.
The second concept behind pharmacogenetics is pharmacodynamics, which is the process by which a drug affects the body. Pharmacodynamics involves discerning how and to what degree a drug binds to its intended receptors in the brain. Some of the inter-individual variability in receptor binding can be predicted by genetic variants.
AssureRx Health tests and interprets numerous pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic genetic variants to help clinicians better understand how their specific patient may tolerate a medication in advance of making a prescription decision. We recognize that every patient is a unique individual, and this should be reflected in their medical treatment.