The impact of pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics

Abstract

Pharmacogenetics is widely proclaimed as about to revolutionise the face of medicine. In a more realistic assessment, the implementation of molecular genetics and biology will continue to provide, as it has done already, better ways to diagnose and treat illnesses, but it will do so at a steady and evolutionary pace based on an improved understanding of the nature of disease, allowing more specific treatments, better risk prediction, and the implementation of preventive strategies. As such, future progress in biomedicine will travel the same well-trodden paths of improved differential diagnosis and risk prediction along which it has advanced over the past decades and centuries. So, while meaningful biomedical research today depends, by and large, on the use of the newly developed tools of genetics and genomics, and the insights gained through them, it is unlikely to fundamentally change the direction of medical progress.