Pharmaceutical education in the wake of genomic technologies for drug development and personalized medicine

The development of safe and effective new therapeutics is a long, difficult, and expensive process. Over the last 20-30 years, recombinant DNA (rDNA) technology has provided a multiple of new methods, molecular targets and DNA-based diagnostics to pharmaceutical research that can be utilized in assays for screening and developing potential biopharmaceutical drugs. In parallel, new innovative approaches to drug delivery systems were discovered and reached the market. Pharmaceutical biotechnology, pharmacogenomics, combinatorial chemistry, in close relation to high-throughput screening technologies, and bioinformatics are major advances that give a new direction to pharmaceutical sciences. To meet with the needs of this new dynamic era of pharmaceutical research and health care environment, pharmaceutical education has to set new priorities to keep pace with the challenges related to genomic technologies. The development of new initiative education programs, for both undergraduate and graduate curricula, in pharmacy has to be focused on preparing pharmacists oriented for both pharmacy practice and drug research and development. This can be achieved by providing future pharmacists with knowledge, skills and attitudes to be more competitive in the health care system, pharmacy practice-related fields, pharmaceutical industry and drug research and development areas, or finally in academia. Educators and pharmacy school members have the responsibility of deciding how, to what extent, by which methods, and/or in which way these changes and new directions in the education programs should be developed.