oa Editorial [Hot Topic: SNPS of Drug Metabolic Enzymes and Personalized Medicine-Part I (Guest Editor: Dong-Qing Wei)]

Drug metabolic enzyme is a key factor to determine the intracorporal processes of drugs. The polymorphism of the drug metabolic enzymes affects almost 30% of the drug metabolism; some susceptibility genes of a disease will be possibly found though systematic analysis of these SNPs. As SNPs may determine the tiny difference between the gene sequences of an individual and a group of people, the researches on SNPs of drug metabolic enzymes will also lead a new way to the personalized drug design and personalized medicine. Recently, significant advance has been made in the areas of pharmacogenetics, functional genomics, structural biology as well as bioinformatics which have been used to study the SNPs of drug metabolic enzymes and their relationship with personalized medicine. We found it necessary to summarize the recent progresses by a special issue on “Current Drug Metabolism”. The main subtopics include: Usage of SNPs in pharmacogenomics; Analyze the SNPs of CYP families in humans; SNPs analysis for prediction of drug efficacy; Construction of SNPs databases for researches of drug response; Prediction of SNPs in drug-response genes; Identification of SNPs for personalized drug design; New methods used for studying SNPs of drug metabolic enzymes Progresses and clinical consequences of personalized medicine and so on.