Pharmacogenomics

People around the world pride themselves on being different. If nobody is exactly the same, then why should everyone take the same drugs to cure their diseases, illnesess, conditions, or infections? Even if they have the same condition, different people respond in their own way to drugs due to their gene expression. Pharmacogenomics takes drugs and specializes them for specific people, and how their genetic makeup will or will not accept a certain degree of a drug. Most patient populations show large interindividual variability in drug response and toxicity (Eichelbaum, Evans, Sundberg 1). In some cases, genes can make a person have negative side effects that can even hurt a situation more than help them. The negative cases are caused by ADR’s, or adverse drug reactions, and increase morbidity and mortality (Eichelbaum, Evans, Sundberg   1). Other people may be completely healed, or only partially helped by the drug. By using pharmacogenomics, scientists can find out which traits are immune to certain drugs and change the drugs to help the patient.
“Clinical observations of inherited differences in drug effects were first documented in the 1950s, giving rise to the field of pharmacogenetics, which has now been rediscovered by the pharmaceutical industry and a broader spectrum of academia, giving birth to pharmacogenomics” (Evans and Johnson 9). Pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics are sometimes used interchangeably because they are extremely similar in what they do. Some people may argue that they are even synonyms. Pharmacogenetics actually came before pharmacogenomics in the field of study. Scientists began to notice that some drugs reacted different depending on the person. The main difference in pharmacogenomics and pharmacogenetics is that pharmacogenomics works more with the drugs, how they interact with all genes, and how they can be manipulated to help a patient (Evans and Johnson 20). Pharmacogenetics has more to deal with a specific gene, multiple...