A resource to acquire and summarize pharmacogenetics knowledge in the literature

To determine how genetic variations contribute the variations in drug response, we need to know the genes that are related to drugs of interest. But there are no publicly available data-bases of known gene-drug relationships, and it is time-consuming to search the literature for this information. We have developed a resource to support the storage, summarization, and dissemination of key gene-drug interactions of relevance to pharmacogenetics. Extracting all gene-drug relationships from the literature is a daunting task, so we distributed a tool to acquire this knowledge from the scientific community. We also developed a categorization scheme to classify gene-drug relationships according to the type of pharmacogenetic evidence that supports them. Our resource (http://www.pharmgkb.org/home/project-community.jsp) can be queried by gene or drug, and it summarizes gene-drug relationships, categories of evidence, and supporting literature. This resource is growing, containing entries for 138 genes and 215 drugs of pharmacogenetics significance, and is a core component of PharmGKB, a pharmacogenetics knowledge base (http://www.pharmgkb.org).