Asthma from a pharmacogenomic point of view

Pharmacogenomics, a fascinating, emerging area of biomedical research is strongly influenced by growing availability of genomic databases, high-throughput genomic technologies, bioinformatic tools and artificial computational modelling approaches. One main area of pharmacogenomics is the discovery of new drugs and drug targets with molecular genetic, genomic or even bioinformatic methods; the other is the study of how genomic differences influence the variability in patients' responses to drugs. From a genetic point of view, asthma is multifactorial, which means that the susceptibility to the disease is determined by interactions between multiple genes, and involves important non-genetic factors such as the environment for their expression. In this review, we summarize collective evidence from linkage and association studies that have consistently reported suggestive linkage or association of asthma or its associated phenotypes to polymorphic markers and single nucleotide polymorphisms in selected chromosomes. Genes that have been found implicated in the disease are potential new drug targets and several pharmacological investigations are underway to utilize these new discoveries. Next, we will focus on the inter-individual variability in anti-asthmatic drug responses and review the recent results in this topic.