One in every 15 hospital admissions is thought to be the result of an adverse drug reaction. Professor Roland Wolf, director of the biomedical research centre, with colleagues from London's Imperial College of Medicine, has been reviewing the progress of research that could put an end to this:
Personal drug profiling Pharmacogenetics is the prescription of medication according to an individual's genetically predetermined response to a drug. By knowing their patients' individual genetic make-up - established using either a simple finger prick of blood or a swab of cells from the mouth - GPs will be able to predict how their patients might respond to different drugs, different drug dosages and different combinations of drugs so preventing any, sometimes potentially fatal, adverse reactions to prescribed medication.
Future research in this area should enable the design of new "tailor-made" drugs for specific groups of patients as well as see the invention of a "DNA chip" cataloguing every individual's personalised total drug sensitivity profile.
Professor Roland Wolf commented : "One day it may be considered unethical not to carry out such tests routinely to avoid exposing individuals to doses of drugs that could be harmful to them."
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