In broader and more useful terms, pharmacogenetics encompasses

any genetically determined variation in response to drugs. This type of variation includes, for instance, the effect, of barbiturates in precipitating clinical disease in persons with acute intermittent porphyria, an autosomal dominant inherited disease associated with intermittent neurological dysfunction, as well as the effect, of alcohol use by pregnant women on the incidence of fetal alcohol syndrome. Pharmacogenomics is the determination and analysis of the genome (DNA) and its products (RNA and proteins) as they relate to drug response.12 Medicine would surely be Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical revolutionized if one could predict, a response before medication and provide a statistical probability of a good or bad response. Current, drug therapy is very much ”one size fits all,“ and the costs of the administration of ineffective drugs Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical and the compensation for serious ADRs of unsuitable medication are immense, not to mention the high number of deaths caused by severe ADRs. The long-term goal of pharmacogenetics is to one day offer personalized medicine, so that clinicians can choose the best treatment for each individual patient. Genetic variation and current testing for monogenic disorders It has been well known

for many years that DNA sequence is highly variable, even within populations. Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical DNA variation can be in the form of single nucleotide substitutions, the deletion or insertion of one or more nucleotides, or the variable repetition of a number of nucleotides (small tandem repeats [STRs] or longer variable number of tandem repeats [VNTRs]). Neutral DNA changes or “variants” (with respect to selective pressures) are referred to as polymorphisms when their Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical rarest allele is present, in Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical more than 1 % of chromosomes in a particular population. Mutations, on the other hand, are rare differences that occur in less than 1 % of the population

(usually much less than 1%) and have typically been discovered in the coding sequences of genes causing rare inherited diseases. How neutral the so-called polymorphisms really arc is merely assumed on the basis of their lack of direct association with a particular phenotype. However, it is feasible to assume that a particular variant may produce a particular phenotype when in combination with particular high throughput screening alleles of other such variants. Adenylyl cyclase The ability to screen particular genes for mutations has developed into an important diagnostic tool, and genetic testing for disorders that, are inherited in a mendelian fashion (primarily single-gene disorders, so-called monogenic) is already well established in medical practice. This is relatively easily performed for monogenic disorders when the causative gene is known, eg, cystic fibrosis, hemophilia, various forms of muscular dystrophy, mental retardation, and late-onset neurological disorders.