drug choice based on your DNA

Mathematical models target disease with drug choice based on your DNA

July 19, 2013

Kinetic modeling of drug response. Upper panel (A): causal effects of genetic, developmental and environmental factors and their  interactions on the outcome of drug response. All these effects operate through PK and PD reactions. Lower panel (B): intermediate steps linking signaling, transcriptional and metabolic networks involved in the distribution and action of drugs. (Credit: Yaqun Wang et al./Advanced Drug Delivery Reviews)

Medicines that are personally tailored to your DNA are becoming a reality, thanks to the work of U.S. and Chinese scientists who developed statistical models to predict which drug is best for a specific individual with a specific disease.

“Traditional medicine doesn’t consider mechanistic drug response,” said Rongling Wu, director of the Center for Statistical Genetics and professor of public health sciences within the division of biostatistics and bioinformatics at thePenn State College of Medicine. “We want to look at how an individual person responds to an individual drug by deriving and using sophisticated mathematical models, such as differential equations.”

Pharmacogenomics + pharmacodynamics/.../