Pharmacogenetics in pancreatic cancer. Highlights from the 45th ASCO annual meeting. Orlando, FL, USA. May 29-June 2, 2009.

Cancer pharmacogenetics is a popular and evolving field in medicine with applications in various types of tumours helping clinicians to apply a more personalized medicine by providing information of prognostic, predictive and therapeutic value. Such evidence of pharmacogenetic applications is been already available in colon cancer (e.g. KRAS status, mismatch repair genes status, UGT1A1 polymorphisms), lung cancer (EGFR mutations, ERCC1 mutations), breast cancer (HER2/neu overexpression) and many others. In all these tumors, the genetic information is rendering the management of the involved patients safer and more effective. Interesting abstracts and announcements from the perspective of pharmacogenomics in pancreatic cancer included Abstract #4611 which suggested the use of a novel genomic study able to detect specific single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with prognostic value, Abstract #4615 which showed that the known proteins alpha1-antitrypsin and alpha1-antichymotrypsin may be predictive of response to gemcitabine and survival, and Abstract #11097 which suggested that human R protein (HuR) expression may be a useful predictive biomarker of gemcitabine treatment. The authors also present here a few other abstracts of pharmacogenomic interest which had negative findings, but believed to be of clinical importance.