Challenges in Current Drug Delivery from the Potential Application of Pharmacogenomics and Personalized Medicine in Clinical Practice

Ioannis   S.   Vizirianakis

doi:10.2174/1567201043480009

Abstract

The recent technological achievements in biotechnology and recombinant DNA technology have provided multiple new methods, molecular targets, and DNA-based diagnostics to pharmaceutical research that can be utilized in assays for screening and developing potential biotechnology-based drugs, as well as in biomedicine, health and pharmaceutical care. Furthermore, such advances opened up new opportunities by applying genetic information data in pharmacotherapy and drug delivery, thus ensuring better drug efficacy and safety in clinical practice. Now the concepts of personalized medicine and pharmacogenomics are likely improving the area of pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics, since they favor differentiation of the conventional clinical diagnosis and drug selection into separate molecular subtypes of individuals belonging within a group of patients suffering from the same disease. Genetic polymorphisms have already been detected and analyzed in genes encoding drug-metabolizing enzymes, transporters as well as targets (e.g. receptors). The potential of applying genotyping and haplotyping analysis in future pharmaceutical care could eventually lead to pharmacotyping, i.e. individualized drug delivery profiling based on genetic-bioinformatic data in routine patient care. However, the steps towards this direction of drug delivery in clinical practice still have a long way to go to be fully achieved; until then, the critical evaluation of all available clinical data including pharmacodynamic, pharmacokinetic and genomic must be assessed for ensuring drug efficacy and safety. In this way, there has been great progress in elucidating genetic determinants contributing to the observed interindividual differences in drug disposition and effects, thus implementing current drug delivery with molecular genetics and diagnostics.

Keywords: pharmacogenomics, drug delivery, personalized medicine, pharmacotyping, gene polymorphisms, snps, haplotyping, genotyping, drug prescribing