Question

There is a lot of published information about genetic polymorphisms and their affect on the metabolism of therapeutic drugs. Despite our understanding of how polymorphisms interact with and affect metabolism of drugs, many physicians, medical associations, and even the Food and Drug Administration are skeptical about allowing the use of this information to inform patient treatment.

As a Molecular Technologist, you have been asked to come up with an idea (eg. information / training / experience that current medical students should have that might make them less hesitant to use pre-treatment molecular diagnostic examination with their future patients. Give one specific idea be creative

Answer 1

Genetic polymorphisms of drug-metabolizing enzymes give rise to distinct subgroups in the population that differ in their ability to perform certain drug biotransformation reactions. • Polymorphisms are generated by mutations in the genes for these enzymes, which cause decreased, increased, or absent enzyme expression or activity by multiple molecular mechanisms.Genetic polymorphisms in drug transporters such as P-gp may predict the partitioning characteristics of a drug between cells and plasma. This may aid either in determining the therapeutic range or avoiding specific drugs with a particularly high risk of efficacy failure or toxicity.The performance of the new pretreatment technique is in the similar level as the QIAGEN extraction kit which is widely used at many clinical sites and the technique can handle various samples such as swab, serum, plasma, whole blood and urine, etc. In addition, even highly viscous sputum sample, which is usually difficult to be processed, could be directly processed without being homogenized. The time needed for pretreatment process could be shortened as low as approximately 15 minutes