European Journal of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences

PHARMACOGENOMICS AND CANCER: THE SCIENCE TOWARDS THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALIZED MEDICINE

Kaiser Jamil*

ABSTRACT

This article on Pharmacogenomics influencing cancer therapeutics summarizes the work leading to the development of personalized medicine. We present here the evidence of several genes responsible for interacting with various neoplastic drugs and their role in influencing the drug resistance or susceptibility. This research article deals with a wide spectrum of cancer patient’s biopsy samples- from solid tumors and such as breast cancer and cervical cancer, and liquid tumors like Leukemias and correlated their SNP changes with respect to various chemo-treatments. We describe here the genomic instability in cancer genomes which occurs due to SNP changes affecting the drug response to chemotherapeutic agents. This leads to poor quality of life (QOL) of the patients, and increases their burden of suffering due to metastasis. Hence knowing the SNP changes or genotyping the tumor samples is of great advantage for better diagnosis and for selecting the right therapeutic agent depending on the patient’s tumor profile. It is an attempt to bring out these aspects in this presentation by refereeing to the research conducted by us on discovering Biomarkers for drug toxicities. SNPs in the following genes, CYP1A1, GST-T1 & M1, MTHFR, and MDR1 were found to interfere in chemotherapeutic responses in these cancer patients. Hence knowing the SNP changes or genotyping the tumor samples will be a great advantage for better diagnosis and for selecting the right therapeutic agent depending on the patient’s tumor profile.

Keywords: Cancer, chemotherapy; adverse drug reactions; drug metabolizing genes; SNPs; Biomarkers; Allelic imbalance; polymorphisms; target genes; molecular therapeutics; personalized medicine.