Автор: Werner Kalow, Urs B. Meyer, Rachel F. Tyndale
Название: Pharmacogenomics, 2nd Edition
Издательство: CRC Press
Год: 2005
ISBN: 9781574448788; 1574448781
Серия: Drugs and the Pharmaceutical Sciences (Book 156)
Язык: English
Формат: pdf
Размер: 26,1 mb
Страниц: 696

The occurrence of genetic influences upon one or other drug response was predicted by Sir Archibald Garrot in his 1931 book Inborn Factors in Diseases, and by J.B.S. Haldane in 1949 in an article entitled “Disease and Evolution”. Pharmacogenetics, as we know it today, arose as a new scientific entity in the late 1950s as a marriage of the older sciences of Pharmacology and Genetics.

Pharmacogenetics deals with heredity and the effect of drugs. It is a branch of science devoted to efforts of explaining variability of one or other drug response, and to search for the genetic basis of such variations or differences. It started by looking at differences between individual subjects, but as it developed, it also became concerned with genetic differences between populations. Many pharmacogeneticists happen to be mostly concerned with the human species but the science applies in principle to all living subjects on earth, primitive or complex, capable of responding to a drug or to a toxic chemical.

In summary, pharmacogenomics will in the long run lead to a better understanding of the interaction between drugs and gene products. The promise of pharmacogenomics is that the choice of drug to combat a disease will be determined more and more by which gene or genes contribute to the disease in a given subject; in other words, we can expect to see the development of individualized, gene-dependend drug therapy.