Washington, Dec 30 (IANS) Personalised medicine to determine the best treatment and the optimal dose carrying the fewest side-effects for an individual, based on genetic makeup, has come a step closer to reality.
Researchers at Georgetown University (GU) Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Centre have come up with a new chip that looks for hundreds of mutations in dozens of genes.

The goal of personalised medicine is to determine the best treatment and the optimal dose carrying the fewest side-effects, especially as new drugs are discovered and treatment options increase.

Variations in our genes encode proteins, which impact how a drug is metabolised or taken in by the cells. This directly impacts the drug’s effectiveness and the kinds of

side-effects that may be caused by its toxicity.

“Currently, available genotyping tools test only a few genes at a time,” explains John F. Deeken, a pharmacogentic researcher at Lombardi, who led the study.

“With a new chip called DMET, as many as 170 genes can be examined for more than a thousand variations,” says Deeken, according to a GU release.

“This type of turn-key testing, if validated, could eventually replace

highly-specialised, time-consuming and labour-intensive testing — thus allowing more institutes the opportunity to pursue genotyping and pharmocogenetic research.

“That alone would be a significant development for our field and for expediting the research many of us believe is the future of medicine,” he says.

The findings were published online in The Pharmacogenomics Journal.