Pharmacogenetic Development of Personalized Medicine: Multiple Sclerosis Treatment as a Model

The goal of pharmacogenetics is to identify "genetic fingerprints" that may predict a patient's response to pharmaceutical treatment. The use of pharmacogenetics replaces the trial-and-error strategy, which governs much of our clinical decision-making regarding treatment allocation in current medical practice, with individually tailored therapy. We review a pharmacogenetic research model, which implements high-throughput single nucleotide polymorphism technology to establish the correlation between drug-responsiveness and genetic polymorphisms of Copaxone(R)-treated multiple sclerosis patients. Implementation of similar pharmacogenetic approaches may promote the development of personalized medicine in multiple sclerosis as well as in other diseases. (c) 2002 Prous Science. All rights reserved.