Preventing adverse drug reactions and more: current clinical use of pharmacogenetic testing

Abstract

Genomic variants affecting an individual’s response to drug therapies are common in populations worldwide. For clinical use, information on pharmacogenomic variation is translated into genotype-based therapy recommendations in evidence-based clinical practice guidelines for an increasing number of drugs. While clinical pharmacogenetic testing is currently still frequently performed at the level of individual genes, recent evidence highlighted the potential of a panel-based testing approach to substantially reduce the incidence of adverse drug reactions. This review provides background on pharmacogenetics, nomenclature used for reporting pharmacogenetic test results, as well as an overview of available resources for pharmacogenetic test interpretation.