The Technology of Pharmacogenomics (Improving Personalized Drug Prescription)
Theoretically, drugs are meant to make people well and not kill them. They are to be prescribed to patients based on the disease the patients have and it is theoretically believed that it should work but in reality, it isn’t always like this. If patients come to the hospital with the same illness/disease, it is likely possible that they will be giving the same medication since they have the same disease/illness/infection but not all of them will respond accordingly to the medication. Some will respond faster and become well, others will respond slowly and the medication might just not kill the microorganisms completely due to the genetic structure of the patient and the rest might not get well at all and in most cases it could lead to death even though they were using medication.
With the above illustration, it is visible that something needs to be done to prevent the death of patient cursed by prescribing medications that aren’t functional to them due to their gene and this is where Pharmacogenomics technology comes into play.
What is Pharmacogenomics technology?
This technology aims to the use of drugs for safety and efficacy of individual patients. The technology has been able to help scientist identify patients that will likely respond positively to a class of drugs and those that wouldn’t as it deals with heredity and response to drugs.
When drugs get into the human bodies, there are certain enzymes which either speeds up the drug function or kills off the drug in the body called the Cytochrome P450 (CYP450) enzymes and this enzymes differ in humans. Since we inherit part of our parent genes, the enzymes either metabolizes drugs fast, intermediate or poorly dependent on the DNA of the patient inherited from their parents.
Pharmacogenomics Technology
It is true that medicine as well as other fields of human activities would not improve if technology isn’t involved and pharmacogenomics is one of it. Using pharmacogenomics information is a way to prescribe medications to patients based on their genetic makeup.
Assurex Health Genesight
Using saliva, this technology helps to know the genetic structure of their patients, which will help the physician/doctor to prescribe drugs that will match the patient genetic structure. This technology helps in treating chronic pain, depression and ADHD.
Other technological methods used in pharmacogenomics technology includes DNA chain terminator which is involved in DNA sequencing technology, DNA microarray or biochip from Array technology and Smart Amp method (which involves amplifying the DNA to study it).
Conclusion
This technology has the great ability to improve the human ability to metabolize drugs and become effective but it is still expensive, and has privacy and ethical issues on its patients. Another downside around the technology is relating genes to outcomes as most drugs require a lot of Cytochrome P450 enzymes and each patient have different makeup of the enzyme so using one patient data for another patient with few similar enzyme composition and metabolism rate might be difficult.
The medicals is not my field though but I found the topic insightful. Pharmacogneomics is a welcomed development that could be helpful you have rightly stated. But it is too expensive then, that will be a problem.
Thanks a lot for the comments, one thing about new technologies, innovations or researches are they are always expensive but as time goes on, methods to make them less expensive will be sorted for.
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