Wednesday 10 December 2014

PHARMACOGENOMICS AND POPULATION DIVERSITY

Because of population genetic diversity, pharmacogenomics correlations are significantly varying from an ethnicity to another one. It happens so that a pharmacogenetic test shows to be of great epidemiological relevance within a certain geographical area, whereas it is of lower impact in some other ones. For instance, the variant 3673A of the VKORC1 gene, an allele to be considered in warfarin dosage, is rare in sub-Saharian Africans (less than 10%) but it is found at an extremely higher frequency in Southeast Asian populations (more than 90%). The Pharamcogenomics for Every Nation Initiative (PGENI) has exactly the aim of characterizing such pharmacogenomics differences among various populations. An online resource dedicated to multi-ethnic frequency data for pharmacogenetically relevant single nucleotide polymorphisms is FINDbase-PGx. Such data are also summarized at PharmaGKB website.