Pharmacogenomic Biomarkers for Prediction of Severe Adverse Drug Reactions

The accumulating knowledge of human genomic variation is being used for the development of personalized medicine, with the aims of decreasing the number of adverse drug reactions and increasing the efficacy of drug treatment. Considerable pharmacogenomic research has focused on understanding the molecular mechanisms behind adverse drug reactions and finding biomarkers that identify people at risk.Serious adverse drug reactions have been shown to cause or contribute to 6 to 7% of all hospitalizations, a 2-day increase in the average length of hospitalization, and 100,000 deaths annually in the United States — and may, according to some estimates, cost about . . .