Applied neurogenomics

Personalized neurology

Personalized medicine simply means the prescription of specific therapeutics best suited for an individual based on pharmacogenetic and pharmacogenomic information. It involves integration of molecular diagnostics with therapeutics. Selection of a suitable medicine from various approaches available based on optimal efficacy and safety in an individual patient will be preferable to trial-and-error approaches. A personalized approach will improve the management of neurological disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, neuropathic pain, and migraine. Gene therapy and RNA interference will facilitate the development of personalized treatment for neurological disorders. It is anticipated that several components of this system will be in place by the year 2010 and it will be a part of neurological practice by the year 2015. However, not all neurological disorders would require a personalized approach.

Pharmaceutical education in the wake of genomic technologies for drug development and personalized medicine

The development of safe and effective new therapeutics is a long, difficult, and expensive process. Over the last 20-30 years, recombinant DNA (rDNA) technology has provided a multiple of new methods, molecular targets and DNA-based diagnostics to pharmaceutical research that can be utilized in assays for screening and developing potential biopharmaceutical drugs. In parallel, new innovative approaches to drug delivery systems were discovered and reached the market. Pharmaceutical biotechnology, pharmacogenomics, combinatorial chemistry, in close relation to high-throughput screening technologies, and bioinformatics are major advances that give a new direction to pharmaceutical sciences. To meet with the needs of this new dynamic era of pharmaceutical research and health care environment, pharmaceutical education has to set new priorities to keep pace with the challenges related to genomic technologies. The development of new initiative education programs, for both undergraduate and graduate curricula, in pharmacy has to be focused on preparing pharmacists oriented for both pharmacy practice and drug research and development. This can be achieved by providing future pharmacists with knowledge, skills and attitudes to be more competitive in the health care system, pharmacy practice-related fields, pharmaceutical industry and drug research and development areas, or finally in academia. Educators and pharmacy school members have the responsibility of deciding how, to what extent, by which methods, and/or in which way these changes and new directions in the education programs should be developed.