CP&T Issue Focuses on Personalized Medicine

The October 2012 issue of Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics focuses on individualized medicine including articles that discuss, reveal and tackle key issues in the field of PGx, and provides examples of current clinical implementation projects. Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics Volume 92, Issue 4 (October 2012)

Amongst these are articles by past and present members of the PGRN:

• Ready when you are: easing into preemptive pharmacogenetics.   He YJ, McLeod HL.
• Pharmacogenomics and individualized medicine: translating science into practice. Crews KR, Hicks JK, Pui CH, Relling MV, Evans WE.
• The relevance of "missing heritability " in pharmacogenomics. Sadee W.
• Strategies for personalized medicine-based research and implementation in the clinical workflow. Lieb W, Völzke H, Pulley JM, Roden DM, Kroemer HK.

and articles we have announced in previous blogs:

• Pharmacogenomics Knowledge for Personalized Medicine. M Whirl-Carrillo, E M McDonagh, J M Hebert, L Gong, K Sangkuhl, C F Thorn, R B Altman and T E Klein.
  
• The 1200 Patients Project: Creating a New Medical Model System for Clinical Implementation of Pharmacogenomics. P H O'Donnell, A Bush, J Spitz, K Danahey, D Saner, S Das, N J Cox and M J Ratain.
  
• Implementing Personalized Medicine: Development of a Cost-Effective Customized Pharmacogenetics Genotyping Array. J A Johnson, B M Burkley, T Y Langaee, M J Clare-Salzler, T E Klein and R B Altman.

CPIC publishes guidelines on interpreting genetic test results for HLA-B*5801 when prescribing allopurinol therapy.

Allopurinol is an analog of the purine base hypoxanthine. It inhibits the conversion of hypoxanthine and xanthine to uric acid by XDH and is used in the treatment of gout.  Severe cutaneous adverse reaction, SCAR, also known as allopurinol hypersensitivity syndrome, is a rare serious and sometimes fatal side effect that occurs in an estimated 0.1 to 0.4% of allopurinol-treated patients.  SCAR is manifested by Stevens-Johnsons Syndrome (SJS), Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis (TEN) or drug reaction with eosinophilia and systemic symptoms (DRESS). 

There is substantial evidence linking HLA-B*5801 with allopurinol-induced SCAR [see Articles: 15743917, 18192896, 19018717, 19696695, 21301380, 21393610, 21545408].  A recent meta-analysis pooling all the published studies gave the odds ratios for allopurinol induced SCAR in HLA-B*5801 carriers as 73 and 165 for studies using healthy controls and allopurinol tolerant controls, respectively [Article: 21906289]. 
A multinational team of rheumatologists, clinicians and pharmacogenomics researchers evaluated the evidence on HLA-B*5801 and allopurinol-induced SCAR. The CPIC guidelines recommend that allopurinol not be used in patients who are known carriers of HLA-B*5801.

To find out more:

Please click here to see excerpts from the guideline and access downloads of the article and supplement . 

Please click here for a complete list of CPIC publications.

European Medicines Agency Drug Labels

European Public Assessment Reports (EPARs) for drugs published by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) that include pgx information are now available to view on PharmGKB. We add any pgx-containing EMA or FDA drug labels that come to our attention.

Like our FDA drug label information, we provide a summary and excerpt from the EMA drug report. A PDF of the EPAR with pgx information highlighted by our curators is available to download.

View our complete list of drug labels with pgx information.

View newly added EMA drug labels and related genes:

• Abacavir and HLA-B
• Aripiprazole and CYP2D6, CYP3A4
• Arsenic trioxide and PML, RARA.
• Clopidogrel and CYP2C19
• Rasburicase and G6PD

New PGRN Featured Project and PI for the Month of December

The PGRN website is featuring a new project and investigator of the month from the NWAP (Pharmacogenetics in Rural and Underserved Populations) group.

For detailed information, please visit the PGRN website.

PharmGKB welcomes Julia Barbarino to the team

We are pleased to welcome scientific curator Julia Barbarino to the PharmGKB team. Julia recently completed her master's in Medical Molecular Genetics from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, where her research focused on epigenetic modifications of the apolipoprotein E gene and their role in human longevity. While undertaking her degree, she had the opportunity to receive lectures in pharmacogenomics, and is excited to be working with PharmGKB in this area of genetics. In addition to her master's degree, Julia also holds a degree in Biochemistry from UCLA.