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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.
