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Pharmacogenetics

Published on December 28, 2009 Archived on September 8, 2024   44 min

A selection of talks on Genetics & Epigenetics

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0:00
Hello. I'm Ann Daly from Newcastle University, and I want to introduce you today to the topic of pharmacogenetics.
0:10
What is pharmacogenetics? It's the study of unusual responses to drugs and other foreign compounds that have a hereditary basis. This is a term that was first used in the 1950s by scientists called Vogel and Motulsky.
0:28
More recently in the 1990s, the term pharmacogenomics has emerged. Pharmacogenomics is the individualization of drug therapy using genomic information. Now that may involve using existing well known drugs or using genomic information to develop new ones. Pharmacogenetics is a sub specialty of pharmacogenomics. But there is considerable overlap between these two subject areas and for the purposes of this presentation, I'm not going to differentiate between them.
1:08
This slide explains a little bit about the history of pharmacogenetics. The first real pharmacogenetic experiment was performed in 1932 when Snyder showed that inability to taste something called phenylthiocarbamide, which has a bitter taste, was genetically inherited. Some modern drugs have a similar structure to phenylthiocarbamide. In the 1950s, when the term pharmacogenetics was actually starting to be used, genetic polymorphisms in at least three genes encoding glucose 6-phosphate dehydrogenase, butyrylcholinesterase and acetylation were described. In the 1970s and 1980s, detailed studies showed the existence of widespread polymorphism in the cytochromes P450.

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