Current Pharmacogenomics and Personalized Medicine (Formerly Current Pharmacogenomics) - Volume 12, Issue 2, 2014

The interest in personalized medicine, together with the search for good genetic biomarkers that predict the individual response to drugs, has increased during the last decades. Several decades have passed since the first description in the 1950’s of variability in the clinical response of patients but still today the use of pharmacogenetics in clinical practice is not a reality worldwide. This is particularly far from happening i Read More

Blood pressure responses to antihypertensive drugs vary widely between individuals. Certain phenotypic factors may predict some drug responses such as plasma renin activity (PRA) as an indicator of activation of the reninangiotensin- aldosterone system. Higher PRA levels may predict better average responses to angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors, angiotensin receptor blockers or β-blockers. Conversely, high salt intake Read More

In this manuscript, we review the literature on the nutrigenetics and pharmacogenetics of vitamin D pathways, with a focus on genes involved in the pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic pathways of vitamin D as they have been major research targets. These include: VDR, CYP2R1, CYP27B1, DHCR7/NADSYN1, GC and CYP24A1. So far only 2 genome wide associations studies evaluated the potential role of genetic pol Read More

While many would argue that personalised medicine has a long history, the era of modern deployment dates only to hormone-receptor guided tamoxifen therapy and growth-factor receptor guided Herceptin therapy in the 1990s and has been rather sporadic in the intervening years. From this uneven beginning, global adoption remains modest, with wide variations in availability of testing and associated therapy. Indeed, whi Read More

The increase in mean corpuscular volume (MCV) is the hematological parameter that better correlates with clinical improvement in sickle cell patients taking Hydroxycarbamide (HU). The mechanism by which HU increases erythrocyte MCV is still unclear. It could be due to megaloblastic changes in the bone marrow cells by the action of HU. To test our hypothesis, morphological, morphometric and cytometric analyses in Read More

Despite the rapid development of pharmacogenetic testing and the frequencies of medication related emergencies increasing, pharmacogentic testing is not yet implemented extensively in clinical practice. Several studies document that polymorphic Cytochrome P450 isoenzymes CYP2C9, CYP2C19 and CYP2D6 are responsible for the metabolism of many clinically important drugs and xenobiotics. These polymorphisms cont Read More