Current Pharmaceutical Design - Volume 15, Issue 32, 2009

The complementary fields of pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics have been widely espoused as promising methods both in achieving the goal of tailored drug therapy at an individual level and in the formulation of methods to for the development of novel drug compounds at a global level. By definition, pharmacogenetics is the study of variability in drug response due to heredity. That is, pharmacogenetics seeks to det Read More

Abnormalities of cardiac rhythm are common clinical problems, resulting in symptoms such as palpitations, breathlessness, stroke, and sudden death. Drugs used to treat arrhythmias have variable actions ranging from completely effective to serious adverse effects, including (paradoxically) sudden death due to drug-induced arrhythmias. Experiments to define the genetic basis for arrhythmia susceptibility and variable respo Read More

Asthma is a chronic disorder causing inflammation and reversible airway obstruction that affects approximately 300 million individuals worldwide. The incidence of asthma has nearly doubled in the past three decades resulting in higher rates of morbidity, mortality and health care costs. Despite the availability of several classes of asthma medications such as β-agonists, leukotriene modifiers and corticosteroids, up to 50 Read More

There has been a decline in the number of new drugs registered over the past decade and regulatory concerns for safety as well as payer concerns for efficacy have focused attention on stratified medicine. Integration of pharmacogenetics into the drug development pipeline will contribute to the development of new stratified drugs. We describe here the concept of pipeline pharmacogenetics and its application th Read More

Genome-wide associations studies (GWAS) have become routine in human genetics research; however the application of GWAS to pharmacogenomics research is just beginning. As these studies make their way into pharmacogenetics, there are several considerations specific to pharmacogenetics that should be made. In this manuscript, we discuss these considerations and provide concrete examples with GWAS Read More

The availability of high-throughput genotyping and sequencing platforms has largely removed technological barriers in the mapping the genetic determinants of drug response in human populations, and the set of validated pharmacogenetic variants is gradually increasing. Like the search for disease-susceptibility variation, however, many of the loci identified to date represent the relatively low-hanging fruit with large phenoty Read More

Drug response and toxicity, complex traits that are often highly varied among individuals, likely involve multiple genetic and non-genetic factors. Pharmacogenomic research aims to individualize therapy in an effort to maximize efficacy and minimize toxicity for each patient. Cell lines can be used as a model system for cellular pharmacologic effects, which include, but are not limited to, drug-induced cytotoxicity or apoptosis, Read More

Cancer therapies through ionizing radiation or chemotherapeutic treatment may result in DNA double strand breaks (DSBs) in cell. DNA-PK has emerged as an attractive target for drug discovery efforts toward DSBs repair and in V(D)J recombination. Hence, the search for potent and selective DNA-PK inhibitors has received particular attention and several series of activity inhibitors have been reported. In this article, w Read More

Nanocarriers are effective non-viral vectors for drug and gene delivery with low immunogenicity in comparison with viral vectors. However, the lack of organ or cell specificity sometimes hinders their application and brings about unexpected side effects. Active targeting is an outstanding strategy recently developed for drug delivery systems, for example, surface modification of nanocarriers with specific ligands could target the pa Read More