The 21st century has been a vital breakthrough regarding advancements in cancer therapies. Based on trial and error various drugs are implemented to patients. Sometimes when your doctor prescribes a drug either it can work efficiently or result in some adverse effects on your metabolism, due to which you need to change your medicine.
Cancer pharmacogenomics helps us to study how variance in a genome can influence the response of people to different cancer drug treatment. Pharmacogenomics involves a precise study on how drugs interrelate with inherited genes. One can get to know that how inherited genes influence the way medication works for individuals.
The variability in individuals with respect to efficacy and toxicity of drug therapy is co-linked with polymorphism of genes which include CYT Isozyme, Transferase, Dehydrogenase, Drug receptors, and DNA repair enzymes. The response of cancer patients to chemotherapy follows a heterogeneous pattern.
Various strategies have been made in cancer diagnostics that include Cancer driven DNA alternations, Polymorphism & Pathway search.
Applying pharmacogenomics within cancer has a different pattern as compared to other diseases that are sometimes equally toxic. In pharmacogenomics, one needs to consider two genomes the germline and the tumor.
We need to know that genetic variations are in germline while the tumor genome bothers somatic mutations that accrue and cancer evolves. So in pharmacogenomics, some differences in the germline genome need to be considered. Various genes have been targeted with the help of these strategies like HER2 gene which is highly targeted for therapeutic purposes of breast cancer.
Pharmacogenomics of cancer is also affected by the pattern of pharmacokinetic gene exposure to cancer drugs. A researcher can get to know about patient sensitivity about treatment.
Chemotherapy is extremely toxic sometimes that it also affects normal cells. Another challenge is that cancer patients are often treated with different combinations and dosages of drugs, so finding a large sample of patients that have been treated the same way is rare.
It's an era for PGx testing to locate that which medication is best for a respective individual. By PGx testing, we are able to know that either Tamoxifen will remove breast cancer or not. Its high time for pharmacists to change their minds about medication and to leverage new technologies. In this long run, health care costs will be minimized by PGx labs.
With the passing time, the ability to profile cancers goes on improving, so will be the therapies that are needed to cure them. As the researchers are giving attention to single-cell sequencing and whole-genome sequencing so we’ll be having a great amount of pharmacogenomic data to analyze. Hence the demand for computational skills of bioinformatics will increase to deal with large amounts of biological data.
Being a great believer of Science, One can conjure up and get to know that this new technology is going to provide unlimited possibilities in medication usage.