How Comprehensive Pharmacogenomics Accelerates Personalized Therapies and Reduces Health Disparities for Minorities

Health disparities exist among various ethnicity groups in the United States, with differences observed in disease prevalence, mortality and medication responses. Together with multiple social-economic factors, genetic variations contribute to the variability across the populations. Pharmacogenomics (PGx) is the study on how genetics explains the individual’s variabilities in responses to medications. Despite the tremendous progress made in PGx research in the past decades, most of the studies have been conducted mainly on populations of European descent. Recently, FDA also issued a draft guidance to address the issue of lack of diversity in clinical trials. Increasing the ethnical diversity in research and clinical trials is an important step to close the health disparity in personalized medicine. The presentation will discuss the advantages and how to overcome the challenges of conducting high-throughput comprehensive PGx testing in order to accelerate ethnicity-unbiased personalized therapies and reduce health disparities among populations.