Impacts of Pharmacogenomics on Pathophysiological Responses
Discuss the impacts of pharmacogenomics on pathophysiological responses to pharmacological agents.
Research precision medicine. Discuss its benefits and concerns surrounding it.
Sample Answer
Discuss the Impacts of Pharmacogenomics on Pathophysiological Responses to Pharmacological Agents
Pharmacogenomics is simply the study of varied responses of individuals to various medications based on their genetics. Therefore, pharmacogenomics allows the evaluation of different genetic variants in an individual that may cause certain drug responses (Ahmed et al., 2016). This is because the genetic variations among individuals in the transporters and metabolizing enzymes will significantly affect the toxicity and efficacy of various drugs. Through pharmacogenomics, scholars seek to clearly understand how different individuals respond to drug therapy and the mechanisms that influence the varying drug response (Ahmed et al. 2016). Every person has a specific genetic makeup that will influence the risk of various diseases and responses to environmental factors and administered drugs. Over the years, the interindividual understanding of drug response behaviors has improved greatly. In contemporary times scholars understand that an individual in a large population can react differently to a drug which explains why some treatments that have been proven efficacious in a given population can produce different responses in some patients. In an individual patient, drug responses will be determined by the prescribed drugs’ pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics properties, which are indirectly or directly affected by the polymorphisms in transporters and drug-metabolizing enzymes (Ahmed et al., 2016).
Precision Medicine and Benefits and Concerns surrounding it
Precision medicine considers the genetics, lifestyle, and environment of an individual to select the most effective treatment for them. The main benefits of precision medicine include the prescription of more effective drugs to patients, avoiding prescribed drugs that have predictable side effects on patients, customization of disease prevention strategies, and shifting an emphasis in medicine from treatment to prevention. The main concerns surrounding precision medicine are related to cost. This is because precision medicine requires expensive infrastructure to set up, which can result in more expensive health care services (Gameiro et al., 2018).
References
- Ahmed, S., Zhou, Z., Zhou, J., & Chen, S. Q. (2016). Pharmacogenomics of Drug Metabolizing Enzymes and Transporters: Relevance to Precision Medicine. Genomics, Proteomics & Bioinformatics, 14(5), 298–313. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gpb.2016.03.008
- Gameiro, G., Sinkunas, V., Liguori, G., & Auler-Júnior, J. (2018). Precision Medicine: Changing the way we think about healthcare. Clinics, 73. https://doi.org/10.6061/clinics/2017/e723
