Current Pharmacogenomics and Personalized Medicine (Formerly Current Pharmacogenomics) - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2008

Pharmacogenetics has made its entrance in psychiatry since the discovery of the first polymorphism directly correlated to individual variability in Cytochrome P450 (CYP) metabolism. Currently, most of the major drugmetabolizing CYP enzymes, their specific CYP-drug relationships and many of their gene variants are known. This has led to the development of elegant models predicting individualized dose recommendations. T Read More

Pharmacogenetics (PGt) is a fast evolving field in medical science, since adverse drug reactions (ADR) and therapy failure may be due to variations in the genes of drug metabolizing enzymes, drug transporters and drug targets. There are many different techniques available for the detection of mutations, Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) and gene copy number variations (CNVs) that allow the scientist to apply the best su Read More

Genomics is becoming the integral part of Pharmacogenomics, and the Paired-End diTag (PET) technology is creating a new paradigm in Genomics. The PET technology directly links the 5' terminal tags of cDNAs or genomic sequences with their corresponding 3' terminal tags to form PET ditags and concatenates them for efficient sequencing. The GIS (Gene Identification Signature)-PET analysis was developed for studying transc Read More

Thiopurine drugs azathioprine and 6-mercaptopurine are inactive compounds that must be metabolized to 6- thioguanine nucleotides to exert their immunosuppressive properties. Hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosyltransferase anabolizes 6-mercaptopurine into the 6-thioguanine nucleotides responsible for the therapeutic activity and drug-related leucopenia. On the other hand, thiopurine methyltransferase (TPMT) metaboliz Read More

There are a number of effective treatments for breast cancer in the neo-adjuvant, adjuvant and metastatic setting. These comprise combinations of radiotherapy, chemotherapy, hormonal treatments and targeted molecular therapies. However the benefit that individual patients derive from these treatments and the toxicity that they experience varies considerably. Differences in cancer patient's responses to therapy can be Read More

The primary goal of immunosuppressive treatment after organ transplantation is to optimize its benefit/risk ratio in order to have the best combination of efficacy and tolerability. Tacrolimus (Tc), Sir (SRL), cyclosporine (CsA) and mycophenolic acid based drugs are characterized by a narrow therapeutic index and broad interindividual variability in their pharmacokinetic parameters. Their bioavailability is affected by a r Read More

Several lines of evidence indicate that apolipoprotein E (apoE) plays a central role in the brain's response to injury and neurodegeneration in the adult. The coordinated expression of apoE and several of its accessory proteins appears to regulate the transport and internalization of cholesterol and phospholipids during development and normal brain reinnervation in the adult. The discovery, a few years ago, that a genetic varia Read More