Pharmacogenetics is the study of genetic determinants for the heterogeneity of responses to asthma medications by the analysis of a gene-environment interaction where the environment is exposed to a pharmacological therapy. This investigative approach greatly facilitates personalized medicine by differentiating treatment responders from non-responders, whereby substantially reducing the economic burden of asthma. On the other hand, such benefits of pharmacogenetic testing have to be balanced against the genotyping cost, willingness of testing and availability of genomic data for trait mapping for individual patients. Candidate gene and pathway-based pharmacogenetic approaches have already identified a number of candidate genes and their functional variants, but larger-scale pharmacogenomics has drawn more and more attention over the past decade due to the decreasing cost of dense arrays with hundreds of thousands of Single-Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) and rapid advances in high-throughput genotyping technology. Ting Fan Leung, Novel Asthma Therapeutics: Insights from Whole-Genome Studies.
Last date updated on April, 2024