News
DNA key to personalized medicine
-
Print -
Comments
-
“So rather than the current system, which is trial and error, wouldn’t it be nice if we could predict which of these individuals would have different responses?”
The concept of “personalized medicine” has gone from the traditional idea of a physician making a diagnosis and prescribing a medication to the next step: how the patient interacts with that medication once he or she starts taking it, Gene D. Morse, professor and associate dean for clinical and translational research in the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, told those attending yesterday’s inaugural lecture in this summer’s UBThisSummer lecture series.
As part of the FDA approval process for drugs, everyone participating in a clinical trial gets the same dosage of the same drug and “we really don’t have a very good way of figuring out who in this group will do well and who will not do well,” said Morse, whose lecture was titled “Personalized Medicine and Pharmacogenomics: Discovering New Genetic Methods to Link Diagnosis and Drug Treatment.”
Morse cited as an example a group of people who have high blood pressure and take a certain medication.
Some, he said, will take the medication and their blood pressure will go down and they will have no adverse side effects. Others will take the medication and their blood pressure will decline, but they will have serious adverse effects. And still others on the medication will continue to have high blood pressure, as well as the side effects.
“When you approach a group of individuals who are all on the same medication, we don’t know who’s going to have that response. So rather than the current system, which is trial and error, wouldn’t it be nice if we could predict which of these individuals would have different responses?” he asked.
He explained that the Human Genome Project has laid the groundwork for personalized medicine, determining the roadmap of our DNA and decoding the chromosomes down to the base players—the genes. Everyone has thousands of genes, and they vary from patient to patient, he said, adding that the technology now exists that can detect those differences in genes among large groups of people.
Morse said the research is starting to show that there are certain genetic tests that can be done to help determine how some medications will work in individuals based on their genetic makeup.
“If you can do that, then you can personalize things. You’ll have an idea what might happen when everybody gets the same medication,” he said. “Being able to predict this would be very useful.”
Researchers at UB and elsewhere are working with the DNA—the code for what proteins are made in the body—and the proteins, which define different functions of the cells.
“So if you can figure out what’s going in the DNA, then figure out which parts of the DNA encode, or send a message, for different proteins, you can actually begin to take what might be a population response (as in the high blood pressure example) and bring it down to an individual response. And that’s eventually what we’d like to be able to do.
“Understanding the DNA allows us to figure out why certain diseases make too much protein or why certain diseases don’t make enough protein,” he said.
In cancer, for example, cells usually are replicating too much. “If you trace it back, you’ll usually find that a protein in the cell is not acting correctly.” In this area of research, he said, scientists are “trying to link the DNA to the proteins and then trying to figure out how to individualize treatment.”
Reader Comments