Pharmacogenetics (PG) refers to the hereditary basis of drug response and has held the promise of pharmacotherapy that is individualised both in the selection and dosing of medications, the potential of which is enticing for clinicians like oncologists faced with prescribing drugs that have unpredictable side effects and narrow...

There is an increasing interest in personalised medicine, perhaps none greater than in the field of oncology. The idea of making therapeutic decisions based on an individual’s genetic makeup, with the ability to predict tumour response, as well as minimise toxicity is extremely appealing to the oncologist. This is...

Inter-individual differences in drug responses are well recognised and may be due to genetic or environmental differences. These genetic or environmental influences may also result in inter-ethnic or inter-geographic differences in drug response. Indeed, drug regulatory authorities are beginning to acknowledge these differences. For example, in 1999, the United...

The goal of any medical therapy is to accurately deliver the right drug against the right disease in the right patient. We have taken this for granted in antimicrobial therapy. Conventional cancer treatment has not been able to achieve such specificity. However, the situation has improved dramatically over the...

Pharmacogenetics, by definition, refers to the study of genetic differences in metabolic pathways which can affect an individual’s responses to drugs in terms of both therapeutic and adverse effects. In recent years, there have been several success stories such as HER2 for trastuzumab in breast cancer and VKORC1/CYP2C9 for...