Where are we today with personalized medicine?

The use of pharmacogenetics information is central to the concept of personalized medicine. Understanding pharmacogenetic differences in drug response and tolerability has been investigated mainly through the study of pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic processes. The hope and promise of pharmacogenetic testing has led to the commercial availability of several testing products. With the exception of the relationship between certain types of adverse drug reactions and immune response genes such as the human leukocyte antigen, a growing body of research has not yet established the clinical utility of pharmacogenetics testing. Variance in findings from pharmacogenetics studies conducted to date may be due to epistasis (gene-gene and gene-environment interactions), epigenetics (non-DNA sequence-related heredity), or other genetic factors, which have been largely unexplored in pharmacogenetics research. Copyright 2012, SLACK Incorporated.