Pharmacogenomics and Personalized Medicine

Book excerpt: Pharmacogenomics is one of the emerging approaches to precision medicine, tailoring drug selection and dosing to the patient's genetic features. In recent years, several pharmacogenetic guidelines have been published by international scientific consortia, but the uptake in clinical practice is still poor. Many coordinated international efforts are ongoing in order to overcome the existing barriers to pharmacogenomic implementation. On the other hand, existing validated pharmacogenomic markers can explain only a minor part of the observed clinical variability in the therapeutic outcome. New investigational approaches are warranted, including a study of the pharmacogenomic role of the immune system genetics and of previously neglected rare genetic variants, reported to account for a large part of inter-individual variability in drug metabolism. In this book, we have collected a series of articles covering many aspects of pharmacogenomics. These include clinical implementation of pharmacogenomics in clinical practice, development of tools or infrastructures to support this process, research of new pharmacogenomics markers to increase drug efficacy and safety, and the impact of rare genetic variants in pharmacogenomics.