简介:Drugs are administered to patients with the intention
of achieving a planned therapeutic response. Yet drug
prescription is a medical art because of the wide variation in
individual responses to standard drug doses. I简介:Drugs are administered to patients with the intention
of achieving a planned therapeutic response. Yet drug
prescription is a medical art because of the wide variation in
individual responses to standard drug doses. In the 1960s,
the field of pharmacogenetics emerged from the dedicated
work of a small group of investigators who began to enrich
the discipline of pharmacology by integrating itwithhuman
genetics. Pharmacogenetics provides the experimental
framework to understand variability in human reactions
to drugs and other exogenous substances as a function of
intrinsic human genetic variability. The maturation of the
human genome initiative has provided a wealth of primary
genetic information and functional genomic data to fuel the
understanding of genetic polymorphism and its functional
consequences. Today, the field of pharmacogenetics is
a well-integrated, worldwide network engaging a vast
community of academic and industrial scientists.
One hallmark of pharmacogenetics studies is the large
amount of genetic data that must be accumulated and
integrated for high-resolution drug-response genotyping
and subsequent phenotype profiling. This need for highly
parallel genetic analysis has, in turn, fueled a demand for
technical innovation to provide the tools necessary for its
execution. The response has been a flurry of inventions
in microfluidics and nanotechnology, some of which
are scaled down versions of existing technologies, such
as capillary electrophoresis and mass spectrometry, and
some are completely new inventions. Outstanding in
this technical revolution are DNA microarrays. Array
technology has emerged as the most versatile and widely
applied tool to support pharmacogenetics, for several
reasons: arrays have the largest and most scalable capacity
for parallel analysis, their inherent flexibility permits them
to be used as independent analysis tools or as integrated
components of more complex microfluidic systems and,
finally, a wide variety of methods can be used to design
and fabricate them. Pharmacogenetics is experiencing a
period of rapid growth and definition. Arrays have proven
themselves to be a technology capable of responding to
the growing and changing needs of the current research
environment and are likely to be equally important as
pharmacogenetics moves into the clinical arena.详细>