PHARMACOGENOMICS: MEDICINES TAILORED JUST FOR YOU
To avoid problems related to differences in body size, age, sex and ethnicity, the lists should be as homogeneous as possible. For example they could be composed of African-American women who developed the disease before, say for example, 45 years and whose body mass index is 25 (+/-)1 Kgs/cm2, and that do not have other ailments.
Another way that is already being carried out is to genotype a homogenous sample of hypertensive people and sees how they respond to a particular drug or set of drugs.
For example, in a study of 63 English patients, it was realized that patients carrying some particular gene variants did not respond differently to the drugs atenolol, lisinopril, and nifedipine, than those patients that do not have the same gene variants.
It is difficult to make a conclusion of a study done with such a small sample, but if it is repeated with a larger sample and the results are the same, it could be suggested that for English patients this gene is not related to how they respond to those drugs. Of course, it still has to be determined if the same is true for people of other ethnic origins.
These two examples give you an idea of how you can find out if a medicine is or is not good for you.
The approach based on the true cause of the disease can take more time because the specific genetic causes of most diseases are not known. That is, suppose that there is a pathway of seven biochemical reactions that control blood pressure, which means that you could develop high blood pressure if any one of those reactions is defective. Thus, there could be seven patients diagnosed as hypertensive each one of them with a different biochemical defect or, what is the same, at the molecular level you have seven different diseases. Probably not all of them will respond well to the same drugs.
The idea, then, is to dissect out the pathway, identify all of its proteins and design drugs specific for each one of them, so that the true cause of the pathology is attacked. The problem is that in most cases, not all of the proteins that participate in those processes are known.
Thus, we can ask: Can a gene be found if we don’t know it? The answer is
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