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Pharmacogenomics: an update

Published on June 29, 2023   54 min

A selection of talks on Clinical Practice

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0:00
My name is Magnus Ingelman-Sundberg. I work at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. I will tell you about some updates in the area of pharmacogenomics.
0:15
We know that drug response and toxicity is highly variable. Differential drug response is common and only 50%-75% of patients respond adequately to medications. It's dangerous because wrong medication procedure can cause adverse drug reactions and they account for about 7% of all hospitalizations. If one considers elderly people of more than 70 years of age, 20% of all hospitalizations are caused by adverse drug reactions. In the EU, we count about 190,000 deaths each year due to adverse drug reactions. The adverse drug reactions are expensive. It accounts for 5%-10% of annual hospital costs. In the US, equivalent to about $80 billion. Also, the individual differences in drug response is a major hurdle for drug development so 32% of novel medications are affected by safety events after the clinical trials have been terminated. This is because the Phase 3 trials encompass maybe 2,000-5,000 patients, whereas on the market, the drug is exposed to millions of people, and they have unique characteristics which makes them susceptible for certain drugs.