Pharmacogenetics is the genetic variability in the response to drugs. Pharmacogenetics aims to develop a more effective and safe therapy, reducing costs, and therefore improving the quality of care. The predictive value of pharmacogenetic analysis prevents the possible appearance of adverse effects, and allows a more personalized dose adjustment.
Medications are currently one of the causes of adverse reactions, resulting in significant morbidity and mortality in patients as well as an increase in health costs. Thus, the lack of efficacy of some treatments is really high in various diseases such as Alzheimer’s (between 30% and 60%); schizophrenia (between 25 and 75%) or hypertension (between 10 and 70%).
Pharmacogenetics has had a great development in recent years due to the technologies of the era of genomics. Currently the efforts of pharmacogenetics are focused on the study of polymorphisms in the DNA sequence, patterns of mRNA expression, the proteome, the metabolome, etc. and the effect of all these elements in the response to drugs.